[Dream] Aiff and Wav

[Dale Ghent]

On Mar 29, 2007, at 11:21 PM, UnderTow wrote:

> Changing from AIFF to WAVE and back will not affect the sound. It just
> changes headers and file organisation and stuff. It doesn't touch the
> actual sample values.
>
> I personaly prefer working with WAVE (BWF to be exact) as it is a
> recognised standard that will be in use for the forseable future.  
> AIFF is
> not a recognised standard (but it will probably be arround for a while
> too). Still, I prefer using standards when possible.

Ahem, AIFF is indeed a standard. Published and endorsed by the  
industry OMFI group.

AIFF and WAVE formats are identical lossless PCM-based formats. Both  
use the stanrdard RIFF container format to contain the PCM audio.

Where AIFF and WAVE differ in that the byte ordering in AIFF is big- 
endian and WAVE is little-endian. This is one of the reasons why AIFF  
was prevalent on Apple hardware (which used big-endian processors  
such as the PPC) and WAVE was adopted by Microsoft (which runs on  
little-endian x86 architectures). Back then, having to do endian  
conversion incurred a measurable, but not significant, hit on  
processing time. That's why mass-platform makers such as Apple and MS  
stuck to AIFF and WAV respectively. Nowadays, that concern is quite  
irrelevant regardless of the endianess of a system.

/dale