We all love listening to or recording good music for later use. High-quality music brings attention to several things; for instance, it can bring cheers for a possible win in a gaming field. This does not happen anyhow, and that’s where audio files come in. In the following, we discuss a little know audio format, with surprising features that help you to store your music in excellent quality without compromises: AIFF.
AIFF stands for Audio Interchange File Format and offers high-quality audio. It is an uncompressed lossless audio format similar to WAV. Since the AIFF files are not compressed, they have high-quality audio compared to MP3 files.
The only limitation is that AIFF files tend to take up more disk space than those of MP3.
How an AIFF File is played
To open an AIFF file and play, one needs to have a media player, such as the Microsoft Windows Media Player, VideoLan VLC media player, a multiplatform, Audacity, Apple Music, and Apple Quick Time Player. These are among the compatible media players with the AIFF file. These tools work smoothly on all desktop environments.
However, if you want to open an AIFF file on your mobile phone the situation looks different. The main issue here is that AIFF files consume a lot of disk space and bandwidth. The good news is, that AIFF files can easily be converted to MP3 or other formats that are supported on all mobile phones.
How to convert an AIFF File to MP3 or other formats?
It is possible to convert any AIFF audio file to other file formats. MP3 is the best choice when you want to play audio files on a mobile device due to its excellent compression. The following explains how to convert AIFF to MP3 using an online converter. The usage of online converters is simple and in most cases they produce a result in few simple steps:
- Go to the website of Converter App (or any other converter website of your choice), select the converter, and submit the AIFF file. In most cases, this is possible by drag and drop.
- Select an output format. MP3 is the best option for your mobile phone. The conversion is done quickly and you can download the MP3 file when the process is complete.
You can convert the AIFF file to a WAV too. All you need is to follow the steps mentioned and export as WAV. However, choosing WAV output is not recommended for mobile devices since the file size of WAV is similar to that of AIFF.
What are AIFF files good for?
AIFF files are good for those who wish to save the files in an uncompressed format. This is because they are comprised of real sounds, which makes them more accurate.
No further action is taken besides converting to the digital format. They produce high-quality audio but then take a lot of storage space.
AIFF – The Best Alternatives
One of the most familiar audio formats is the MP3 format, which is widely known. But others still exist and offer a wide range of alternatives besides the AIFF. These include MP3, WAV, AAC, OGG, FLAC, and WMA.
MP3: MP3 Stands for MPEG-1 Layer 3, an audio file released in 1993 and became the most famous audio file format in the world. The reason it is called MP3 is that it has three goals which are:
- Dropping all the sound data which is not within the scope of what normal people would hear.
- Reducing the quality of bad audios.
- Compression purposes for disk saving.
MP3 is a universal audio file that can never let you down whether using a smart TV, mobile phone, PC, or any other machine. It is easily compatible.
WAV: This is another audio format for Waveform Audio File Format developed back in 1991 by Microsoft and IBM. It contains different audio files that could be compressed or uncompressed. However, it is worth noting that it rarely uses compressed files. For the uncompressed files, WAV uses the PCM format, generally used for encoding.
It mostly applies to Windows operating system but can also work with Mac systems without challenges.
AAC: The Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) is an audio file developed in 1997 to replace MP3. However, this has proved hard, and MP3 still maintains a strong lead because it is easy to use and has already been popularized worldwide.
Furthermore, AAC uses a more advanced compression though it is much more technical than MP3. Due to this advancement, it always produces better quality audios for the same recording with MP3 and with the same bitrates.
However, AAC is still widely used for Android, iOS, YouTube, and PlayStation in a big way. But still, MP3 remains a household format friend for many.
Conclusion
We have seen that AIFF is a really interesting audio format. However, it never reached the same market dominance as most of its competitors. Although AIFF offers higher audio quality, WAV happens to be more popular. But in the same case, AIFF is still a good trade-off for quality audio. If you plan to listen to the audio on mobile devices you should go for a different format.
