What is MP3?
MP3 is the format that made digital music portable, and thirty years on it is still the safest bet that a file will simply play - on any device, in any car, in any decade-old piece of hardware. It is lossy, and its patents expired in 2017.
What is WAV?
WAV is raw PCM audio with a small header - uncompressed, unprocessed and enormous, at roughly ten megabytes a minute for CD-quality stereo. It is the working format of audio editing, sampling and speech tooling, where every stage wants the samples themselves rather than a codec's approximation.