What format is an uncompressed MP3 file in?

Question

I have seen that, leaving aside header and other structure data, a compressed file format still has some structure in its main data, and it can be compared to another, uncompressed format.

For instance, if the image date of a GIF file gets decompressed, it basically becomes the same as an indexed BMP file (using a palette and pixels that index a palette offset), and maybe with rows vertically inverted because of the BMP specification, but basically the very same data sequence.

So, if an MP3 gets decompressed, what file format would it be represented in? A WAV file, or something else?

Answer 1

What you get are raw samples. You can write these easily (i.e. simply dump them) in a WAV file, although you still have to output the WAV header manually.