WaveFormat Fields

The fields of the WaveFormat class are listed below. For a complete list of WaveFormat class members, see the WaveFormat Members topic.

nAvgBytesPerSec	Required average data transfer rate, in bytes per second. For example, 16-bit stereo at 44.1 kHz has an average data rate of 176,400 bytes per second (2 channels — 2 bytes per sample per channel — 44,100 samples per second).
nBlockAlign	Block alignment, in bytes. The block alignment is the minimum atomic unit of data. For PCM data, the block alignment is the number of bytes used by a single sample, including data for both channels if the data is stereo. For example, the block alignment for 16-bit stereo PCM is 4 bytes (2 channels — 2 bytes per sample).
nChannels	Number of channels in the waveform-audio data. Mono data uses one channel and stereo data uses two channels.
nSamplesPerSec	Sample rate, in samples per second.
wBitsPerSample	Bits per sample for the wFormatTag format type. If wFormatTag is PCM, then wBitsPerSample should be equal to 8 or 16. For non-PCM formats, this member must be set according to the manufacturer's specification of the format tag. Note that some compression schemes cannot define a value for wBitsPerSample, so this member can be zero.
wFormatTag	Format tag.