The AIFF format is based on the Interchange File Format ( IFF ).

Apple Computer's AIFF is a big endian audio file format developed from IFF.

* AIFF ( a big-endian derivative of IFF, originally from Apple )

This IFF was adopted by a number of developers including Apple for AIFF files and Microsoft for RIFF files ( which were used as the basis for the AVI and WAV file format ).

WAV and AIFF are flexible file formats designed to store more or less any combination of sampling rates or bitrates.

* AIFF – standard audio file format used by Apple.

While data reduction ( compression, be it lossy or lossless ) is a main goal of transform coding, it also allows other goals: one may represent data more accurately for the original amount of space – for example, in principle, if one starts with an analog or high-resolution digital master, an MP3 file of a given size should provide a better representation than a raw uncompressed audio in WAV or AIFF file of the same size.

Audio Interchange File Format ( AIFF ) is an audio file format standard used for storing sound data for personal computers and other electronic audio devices.

The audio data in a standard AIFF file is uncompressed pulse-code modulation ( PCM ).

The file extension for the standard AIFF format is. aiff or. aif.

The only difference between a standard AIFF file and an AIFF-C / sowt file is the byte order ; there is no compression involved at all.

When a file is imported to or exported from iTunes in " AIFF " format, it is actually AIFF-C / sowt that is being used.

Note: As of Mac OS X version 10. 4. 9, the system will sometimes incorrectly display the AIFC icon for files with the. aif extension, whether or not the actual file format is AIFF or AIFF-C.

An AIFF file is divided into a number of chunks.

The iPod line can play several audio file formats including MP3, AAC / M4A, Protected AAC, AIFF, WAV, Audible audiobook, and Apple Lossless.

The software then dumps them into a WAV or AIFF file, or feeds them to another codec to produce, for example, a FLAC or MP3 file.

Some of the original file formats used to encode the music were WAV, AIFF and MP2.

Once a student completes a computer composition, they must " bounce " their Pro Tools file to disk, which creates a single AIFF file ready to be burned to CD.

Using large file sizes inherent of WAV or AIFF files will very quickly fill the device's low 1 GB capacity.

Audio that is not in the native AIFF file format needs rendering before it can be played back.

Absynth relies on user-based waveforms ; either drawn directly, by manipulation of a sound spectrum, or else extracted from a WAV or AIFF file.

* Reading and writing AU, WAV, AIFF, MP3 ( via an external LAME MP3 encoder ), Ogg Vorbis, FLAC and other audio file formats

It is an application of the Resource Interchange File Format ( RIFF ) bitstream format method for storing data in " chunks ", and thus is also close to the 8SVX and the AIFF format used on Amiga and Macintosh computers, respectively.

Standard AIFF is a leading format ( along with SDII and WAV ) used by professional-level audio and video applications, and unlike the better-known lossy MP3 format, it is non-compressed ( which aids rapid streaming of multiple audio files from disk to the application ), and lossless.

With the development of the Mac OS X operating system, Apple created a new type of AIFF which is, in effect, an alternative little-endian byte order format.

Apple has also created another recent extension to the AIFF format in the form of Apple Loops used by GarageBand and Logic Audio, which allows the inclusion of data for pitch and tempo shifting by an application in the more common variety, and MIDI-sequence data and references to GarageBand playback instruments in another variety.

These included the ability to create custom chords for Smart Instruments, support for 3 / 4 and 6 / 8 time signatures, and exporting in AAC or AIFF format.

These other lossless codecs, such as FLAC and Shorten, are not natively supported in Apple's iTunes software, either in desktop operating systems ( Mac OS or Windows ) or iOS devices, so users of iTunes software who want to use a lossless format which allows the addition of metadata ( unlike WAV / AIFF or other PCM-type formats, where metadata is usually ignored ) have to use ALAC.

FourCC is a system of data format identification used in some platform-independent multimedia containers, such as AIFF and RIFF.

* On PCs, the term PCM and LPCM often refer to the format used in WAV ( defined in 1991 ) and AIFF audio container formats ( defined in 1988 ).

The video project is typically sent from Final Cut Pro to Compressor, where it can be converted into the DVD MPEG-2 format with Dolby Digital ( ac3 ) or AIFF sound.

Because the AIFF architecture has no provision for alternative byte order, Apple used the existing AIFF-C compression architecture, and created a " pseudo-compressed " codec called sowt ( twos spelled backwards ).

Apple uses this new little-endian AIFF type as its standard on Mac OS X.

All traditional AIFF and AIFF-C files continue to work normally on Mac OS X ( including on the new Intel-based hardware ), and many third-party audio applications as well as hardware continue to use the standard AIFF big-endian byte order.

Interchange File Format ( IFF ), is a generic container file format originally introduced by the Electronic Arts company in 1985 ( in cooperation with Commodore-Amiga ) in order to ease transfer of data between software produced by different companies.

Most files with. iff extension are in fact ILBM files, wrongly named so because they are the most common IFF files and most assume that they are the only type of IFF files ( on many systems that generate IFF files, file extensions are not important ).

An IFF file is built up from chunks.

Chunks must begin on even file offsets, as befits the origins of IFF on the Motorola 68000 processor, which couldn't address quantities larger than a byte on odd addresses.

The top-level structure of an IFF file consists of exactly one of the group chunks: FORM, LIST or CAT, where FORM is by far the most common one.

There are standard chunks that could be present in any IFF file, such as ‘ AUTH ’ ( containing text with information about author of the file ), ‘ ANNO ’ ( containing text with annotation, usually name of the program that created the file ), ‘ NAME ’ ( containing text with name of the work in the file ), ‘ VERS ’ ( containing file version ), ‘( c ) ’ ( containing text with copyright information ).

* PNG ( a modern graphics file format with chunk structure inspired by IFF )

Of course, an ILBM file can have any of the standard IFF chunks for description of author, version, copyright etc.

It is a data subtype of the IFF file container format.

The 8SVX subtype stores 8-bit audio data within chunks contained within an IFF file container.

8SVX subtypes can exist alone within IFF file containers ( audio only ), or can be multiplexed together with other IFF subtypes, such as video animation streams.

An example layout of an audio-only 8SVX IFF audio file:

< pre >' IFF data, Z-machine or Glulx saved game file ( Quetzal )'</ pre >

As being very efficient and also being an official subset of existing Amiga ILBM / IFF standard file format, it became the de-facto standard for any animation file on Amiga.

The initial frame is a normal run-length-encoded, IFF picture, and this allows to have an initial preview of the contents of the file.

In 1985 Electronic Arts introduced the Interchange File Format ( IFF ) meta-format ( family of file formats ), originally devised for use on the Amiga.