[Dream] Aiff and Wav

[UnderTow]

On Fri, 30 Mar 2007, Dale Ghent wrote:

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

OMFI is really an Avid thing. In other words it is not a public 
organisation (although it is recognised by other public organisations). 
OMF is also being superseeded by AAF.

BWF on the other hand is recognised by the following organisations: EBU, 
ITU, APBU, NAB, IRTO, ATSC, AES, CCIR, FCC, NTSC, ISO. (and more probably 
including OMFI group). These are the kind of organisations I mean.

That having been said, AIFF will probably be arround for the forseeable 
future.

> 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.

Correct but AIFF doesn't support timestamping afaics so BWF really is a 
superior format.

UnderTow