Hi Stacey, AIFF files are uncompressed audio files. The acronym stands for "Audio Interchange File Format", and they are the Mac equivalent of WAV files. The sound quality is equivalent, but the internal formatting and header structure differs between AIFF and WAV files. All your system sound files on the Mac are some form of AIFF or compressed AIFF (with ".caf" extension name) file. Any simple, real-time streaming audio recorder on your Mac or iOS device, including Voice Memos, records to AIFF format. Producing a compressed format such as MP3 or AAC requires that an app store or buffer the audio contents in some way, and then perform a conversion in an intermediate step with an encoding CODEC to transform the uncompressed recording as the app is running.
Your Mac will see the sound files from commercial audio CDs as AIFF files. On a Windows system, these would be seen as WAV files. There are some differences in the kind and level of metadata in the headers of these two formats when used by third-party apps, if you were broadcasting, for example, but as far as audio content, just think of AIFF files as the standard for Macs, and the counterpart to WAV files on Windows. HTH. Cheers, Esther On Sep 6, 10:29 am, Stacey Robinson <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi all, > Can someone tell me what AIFF files are? > Thanks, -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en.
