8 March 2026 | 5 min read
Why your poly WAV shows Track 1 to Track 8, and how to get real names
Boom, Lav Marie, Plant Kitchen. Or Track 1, Track 2, Track 3. The difference is one metadata block and a recorder someone bothered to configure.
A polyphonic WAV interleaves every channel of a take into one file. The audio itself carries no idea of what each channel is. The names come from a separate block of metadata, and if that block is missing or ignored, you get generic numbering.
Where the names live
Field recorders write an iXML chunk containing a TRACK_LIST: one entry per channel, each with an index and a name. Set those names on the recorder before the shoot and every downstream tool that reads iXML will show them.
Why they disappear
- The recorder was never configured, so it wrote Track 1 through Track 8.
- A converter rewrote the WAV and dropped the iXML chunk on the way.
- The reading tool only understands the bext description, not iXML.
- The file was normalised or trimmed by a utility that rebuilds the header.
Check before you assume
Drop the file into the audio inspector on this site. It parses the iXML track list and the channel mask in the browser and shows the real channel layout and names, without uploading anything.
Keep the names when you split
When a poly WAV is split into mono stems, the exported files should inherit the track names rather than a numeric suffix. That is the difference between eight files called boom, lav_marie, plant_kitchen and eight called take_01_1 through take_01_8.
The splitter here reads the embedded names and uses them for the exported stems, so the naming work you did on set survives into the edit.
If the names are wrong
Recorders get reused and names get stale. Rename the stems after splitting rather than trusting a track list from last month's job, and check one file per card at ingest.