Audio Interchange File Format

AIFF (Audio Interchange File Format) is an audio container format developed by Apple Computer for their Macintosh computers.

It is, in a sense, the Mac-world equivalent of the Miscrosoft WAV format.

It can hold both uncompressed (PCM) and compressed data. The compressed formats most commonly found inside AIFF are ADPCM and MACE.

It supports multichannel streams, high sampling rates and high bit depths. The amount of audio data it holds is limited to 2Gb.

Documentation on the AIFF file format