title: What is the Standard Format for Digitized Audio? 
creators: Nick Krabbenhoeft
abstract: The best practices for representing analog audio with digital bitstreams are relatively clear. Sample the signal with 24 bits of resolution at 96KHz. The standards for storing the data are less clear, especially for media with complex configurations of faces, regions, and streams. Whether accomplished through metadata and/or file format, the strategy chosen to represent the complexity of the original media has long-term preservation implications. Best practice guides rarely document these edge cases and informal discussions with practitioners have revealed a wide range of practices. This paper aims to outline the specific challenges of representing complex audio objects after digitization and approaches that have been implemented but not widely adopted.