Media type / audio
audio/wav
Uncompressed PCM audio in a RIFF container — the working format for editing and speech processing.
Served inline: Browsers display this in the tab without granting it script access to the page. Safe to serve inline, provided the bytes really are what the header claims.
Browser behaviour
Renders inertly
Charset
no charset
Compression
Compress in transit
Send it like this
Content-Type: audio/wavA binary payload has no character encoding. A charset parameter here is meaningless and occasionally confuses strict parsers.
Handling verdict
Browsers display this in the tab without granting it script access to the page. Safe to serve inline, provided the bytes really are what the header claims.
A binary payload has no character encoding. A charset parameter here is meaningless and occasionally confuses strict parsers.
The payload is text-like or otherwise repetitive, so gzip or Brotli removes real bytes. Enable it at the server or CDN.
Registered with IANA through a public review process, so the name is stable and every implementation can rely on it meaning the same thing.
Anatomy of the name
RFC 6838Top-level type
audio
Audio
Subtype
wav
Registered in the standards tree.
Structured syntax
none
No suffix, so the payload format is defined entirely by the subtype itself.
Parameters
none
Beyond the charset rule above, this type defines no parameters of its own.
What trips people up
1 note- Genuinely compressible, unlike every other audio type here, because the samples are stored raw.
Response headers
Content-Type: audio/wav
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
Content-Disposition: inline
Vary: Accept-Encodingnosniff stops the browser second-guessing the type you declared, which is what makes the rest of this reliable. Serving it inline is safe here because the browser renders it without granting it script access.
Server configuration
extension mappingnginx
types {
audio/wav wav;
}Apache
AddType audio/wav .wavCaddy
@type path *.wav
header @type Content-Type "audio/wav"Extensions and other spellings
with signatureFile extensions
Also written as
These reach the same handler in practice. Accept them on input; send audio/wav on output.
File signature
52 49 46 46 ?? ?? ?? ?? 57 41 56 45
Check these bytes rather than the client-supplied Content-Type when validating an upload. The header is a claim; the signature is evidence.