WAV vs. AIFF


Is there any benefits/disadvantages of one of these over the other? I have read the one advantage of AIFF is that it carries meta tags, but are there any other differences? WAV is said to be an exact match of the original, what makes AIFF different that Apple felt the need to create it?
brianmgrarcom

Showing 1 response by james1969

Between WAV and AIFF I think it's more a matter of which platform you wish to use - WAV for Windows or AIFF for MacOS. When I had a media server I built for Windows, I used WAV. Now that I use a Mac I'm using AIFF. Both support lossless compression, so that's all I worry about really.

The alternative to not being tied down to a specific computer platform is to go with FLAC, but I have not used that format.

For digital audio formats some things to consider is compression (bad, very bad for good sound) vs file size and sound quality. A format that supports lossless compression will give you the best balance between these 3 variables.

When it comes to tagging and meta data, I really don't pay attention to these things, so I can't give you more info there.