Can WAV Files Have Multiple Channels?

[powerstone05]

Is it possible that a wav file (or any other lossless/lossy codec) can have more than 2 channels?
I'm ripping DVDs and I think there's a way to rip the audio from a dvd into a pc digital format yet it can be replayed in 5.1 Surround Sound.

[redwudz]

You could try Aud-X. It can do 5.1 audio in a MP3 format, though it has nothing to do with the WAV format.

[hrlslcbr]

You could just leave it as AC-3 or DTS. That way you won't lose quality transcoding to another format and you'll keep all 6 (5.1) channels.

[Alex_ander]

Decoding 5.1 .dts or .mlp gives 6-channel .wavs that can be opened in multitrack mode of Audition 2 or Wavelab 5.

[TooLFooL]

will goldwave open these multichannel wavs?

[Alex_ander]

No

[Cornucopia]

These should answer your questions (although, they may lead to more confusion)...

1. WAV files can be multichannel, but wave files have gone through a number of revisions:

• WAVFORMAT
  WAVEFORMATEX
  WAVEFORMATEXTENSIBLE

Only the last one is unambiguous as to how to handle the channels.
2. Because of this, likely only the apps that support WAVEFORMATEXTENSIBLE (or ALL) will recognize and handle multichannel waves correctly.
3. The apps that are out there are across the spectrum when it comes to this support. Same thing with HighSampleRate and HighBitdepth.
4. Apps that support WAVEFORMATEXTENSIBLE (and HiSR and HiBD and BWF), which usually are also the ones that support Wave64 (>4GB files), are usually the mid-to-high end NLE, DAW and sampling apps (ProTools, Vegas & Soundforge, Audition?, Logic?, Nuendo, etc)
5. There are [hard to find] utilities out there on the internet that allow you to convert from multichannel to multiple mono files (and vice-versa), and to convert between the various revisions.
6. I've been talking about LPCM WAV, there are other tools that'll deal with multichannel compressed streams.

MC tools and Hypercube Transcoder and good places to start for utilities...

Scott

[Cornucopia]

Hey, I just found out the newest version (v1.32beta) of Audacity is supposed to support Multichannel waves!

Scott

[guns1inger]

Back to the OP - AC3 and DTS multi-channel audio is in digital form, and can be played back on any PC that has the correct decoders (installed by most DVD playback software). Given that a 90 minute movie's 5.1 AC# audio might occupy as little as 300MB, where as the same length stereo uncompressed PCM audio would take closer to 2 GB's of space, why would you want to convert. The quality will not be any better, given the audio was compressed when it was encoded, and that data is now gone.

So the answer is yes, it can be done, however your reasons for wanting to do it seem flawed.