Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

augustya

Suspended
Original poster
Feb 17, 2012
3,331
464
Can the iPhone 4S play WAV File natively or do I need to download a Music Player which plays that. I dont wanna convert them to any other format because of quality issues.
 
Yes. Pretty sure if I remember correctly, I was able to play WAV files on my iPhone 4.
 
Can the iPhone 4S play WAV File natively or do I need to download a Music Player which plays that. I dont wanna convert them to any other format because of quality issues.

Quality issues? WAV is a wasteful format, you can just switch to ALAC and retain the same quality while saving some space.
 
Quality issues? WAV is a wasteful format, you can just switch to ALAC and retain the same quality while saving some space.

Why is it a wasteful format, because its uncompressed? Even though Apple Lossless is as named a lossless format, its still compressed. In some mediums, people need to work with uncompressed audio. Maybe the WAV files are being delivered to him from a film shoot or a recording session and thats the format they are recording in. It saves time to be able to directly load a WAV and listen to that than having to compress the file being delivered. Its an extra step, no matter how quickly it can be done.
 
Why is it a wasteful format, because its uncompressed? Even though Apple Lossless is as named a lossless format, its still compressed. In some mediums, people need to work with uncompressed audio. Maybe the WAV files are being delivered to him from a film shoot or a recording session and thats the format they are recording in. It saves time to be able to directly load a WAV and listen to that than having to compress the file being delivered. Its an extra step, no matter how quickly it can be done.

Why would any of that matter on a phone, an iPhone at that? Good luck getting those files off there easily. If you really need WAV files, just keep them as your source files and use FLAC/ALAC/MP3 on other devices since they are much easier to deal with on space constrained devices.
 
iPhone does support SOME wav formats. But you need to try it out first, if the wav is not PCM encoding. Due to the processor power, even wav, sometimes playback is just impossible.
 
Quality issues? WAV is a wasteful format, you can just switch to ALAC and retain the same quality while saving some space.

Holy Smoke ! What in the name of Hell !! I just paid some $20 to download some 6-7 tracks on beatport and I only wanted WAV format because they are lossless and uncompressed !! and not some crap like MP3 ! Now if someone tells me that WAV is a wasteful format ! I am gonna beat the S***T out of myself for having spent so much !!
 
Last edited:
Guys how do I find out that the tracks that I purchased last night on beatport which are all WAV files which beatport is saying is lossless an beatport customer service guys are saying you can search for a audio spectrum analyser on the Internet to test it ! is it ? How can I verify find out that what I have downloaded and got is lossless music ?
 
Guys how do I find out that the tracks that I purchased last night on beatport which are all WAV files which beatport is saying is lossless an beatport customer service guys are saying you can search for a audio spectrum analyser on the Internet to test it ! is it ? How can I verify find out that what I have downloaded and got is lossless music ?
One quick indicator is the size. Typically, a lossless 4:30 song should be somewhere around 35-55MB. For wave, add 40% more storage on top of that.
The audio spectrum analyzer is a thing because lossless audio, unlike lossy audio, will retain all available information of a song, although there are more than just one lossless format and some are better. Because lossless retains all information, high frequency region and part of low frequency region will be preserved. In lossy format however, these parts will either be reduced or removed completely to save up space.
If you check the song you bought in a spectrum analyser and does not see any cutoff, then this song is likely to be a lossless song. Bear in mind though, this could be faked to an extent to trick such analyser.
 
Holy Smoke ! What in the name of Hell !! I just paid some $20 to download some 6-7 tracks on beatport and I only wanted WAV format because they are lossless and uncompressed !! and not some crap like MP3 ! Now if someone tells me that WAV is a wasteful format ! I am gonna beat the S***T out of myself for having spent so much !!

He meant wasteful as their are codecs out there that are "lossless" and still compress the file. The wasteful he is discussing is the amount of storage space used. WAVs are 99% of the lossless and uncompressed, but they can be used as containers for compressed audio. Also, even though WAVs themselves are uncompressed, you can create an uncompressed WAV from an MP3 or other compressed format, and that created WAV will still be no better than its MP3 source, just taking up more space
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.