2 March 2026 | 5 min read
WAV vs AIFF: does the choice still matter in 2026?
Same audio, different container. The decision comes down to metadata and who receives the file.
WAV and AIFF store the same thing: uncompressed linear PCM. Convert one to the other at the same sample rate and bit depth and the audio is bit identical. So why does anyone care?
The short history
WAV came from the Microsoft and IBM world, AIFF from Apple by way of Electronic Arts. For years that shaped which one you saw in which studio. Both have been fully cross platform for a long time, and modern software reads both without complaint.
Where they genuinely differ
- Metadata: WAV has the BWF extensions, bext and iXML, which the entire location sound industry relies on. AIFF has its own chunk system, less consistently supported for production metadata.
- Byte order: WAV is little endian, AIFF is big endian. Irrelevant to you, relevant to whoever writes the decoder.
- File size limits: classic WAV is capped near 4 GB, which long multitrack recordings can hit. RF64 and Wave64 extend it. AIFF has a similar practical ceiling.
- Habit: music production on Apple systems leans AIFF, film and broadcast lean WAV almost universally.
Which one to choose
For film, television, documentary and any workflow involving a field recorder, choose WAV. The BWF metadata layer is not optional in that world: timecode, scene, take and track names all live there.
Choose AIFF when a client or a sample library explicitly asks for it, or when you are delivering into a music pipeline that standardised on it years ago. There is no quality argument in either direction.
Converting between them
Because both are PCM, conversion is a container change, not a re-encode. Nothing is lost in the audio. What can be lost is metadata, since bext and iXML do not survive a naive trip to AIFF.
If you need AIFF deliverables and want to keep production data, keep the WAV masters, note the metadata separately, and generate AIFF only for the delivery. The extractor and export tools here write both WAV and AIFF at the sample rate and bit depth you choose, locally in your browser.