Browse all MIME types

audio/wav

WAV keeps audio close to source quality, so it is widely used in editing, archiving, and speech-processing pipelines.

audio
Usually already encoded

Content-Type header

Content-Type: audio/wav
Common extensions
.wav

How teams usually encounter it

This page maps the media type to the file extensions and delivery behaviors developers usually care about: browser parsing, upload validation, cache correctness, and asset handling.

Compression signal

audio/wav is usually already compressed or stored in a binary-heavy format, so extra transfer compression tends to help less.

Server config snippets

Use these when a server is missing the right extension-to-MIME mapping or you want the expected header to survive a proxy, CDN, or custom asset bucket setup.

Nginx
types {
  audio/wav wav;
}
Apache
AddType audio/wav .wav

Magic bytes / file signature

When you need to validate uploads or investigate a mislabeled file, the signature often starts with 52 49 46 46.

Operational shortcut

If a browser downloads this asset instead of rendering it correctly, check the response header first, then verify the extension mapping on your origin and edge cache. .wav is the fastest sanity check for teammates reviewing the file outside the app.

Related audio types