I don't know if I am being particularly dense, but I can't see what the
specification of broadcast wave format is getting at when it defines "time
reference".

It seems to be saying it's the number of samples since midnight, to the time
when the sample was made, but it surely means something more like : "the
number of samples from the start of some logical time reference, to which
all other samples relate".

Here's the quotation
"TimeReference This field contains the timecode of the sequence. It is a
64-bit value which contains
the first sample count since midnight. The number of samples per second
depends
on the sample frequency which is defined in the field nSamplesPerSec from
the
format chunk."

I just can't see why, if you are making various audio files to be later
strung together in some way, you would want to know the exact time the
source material was sampled/created/extracted, rather than define some kind
of relative value. And, isn't this convoluted sentence merely saying "time
of day in terms of seconds times sample rate"?

Geoff.