[PaulDavisThe1st]

That's easy to do if you first strip the WAV formatting stuff and then at the end add back the format information.

You can't really do it without that, because sound.wav contains both actual audio data and "metadata".

In the real world however, almost nobody who has done this sort of thing actually wants to do it that way. The processing always has a lot of parameters and you are going to want to play with them based on the actual contents of sound.wav. Doing this in realtime (listening while fiddling) is much more efficient than repeatedly processing then listening.