AIFF Files Larger Than WAV Files?

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Level 1

9 points

AIFF Files Larger Than WAV Files?

I imported a song twice, once in AIFF and the other time in WAV, and removed all of the metadata from each file to get an accuarte size of just the audio file and nothing else, and noticed that the AIFF file was slightly larger than the WAV file. I was under the impression that AIFF and WAV were the exact same in size due to being bit for bit identicle to eachother (No quality loss between converting back and forth between the two formats), can somebody explain this?

Posted on Nov 21, 2012 10:18 PM

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Answer 1

Nov 22, 2012 6:09 AM in response to Eric009

It depends on how big a difference you are seeing. The header for AIFF might be slightly bigger (even without metadata). It maybe that if the file previously had metadata even though you have deleted the space previously used might still be there but now empty.

Full specifications for the AIFF format are available here

http://www-mmsp.ece.mcgill.ca/Documents/AudioFormats/AIFF/AIFF.html

http://www-mmsp.ece.mcgill.ca/Documents/AudioFormats/AIFF/Docs/AIFF-1.3.pdf

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Answer 2

Eric009 Author

Level 1

9 points

Nov 22, 2012 7:15 AM in response to John Lockwood

The size difference I see are very minimal. For example, 37,248,668 bytes for the WAV file and 37,250,942 bytes for the AIFF file. Is this normal? And wile I'm at it, what is the difference between the given "size" (in bytes) and the given "size on disk"?

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Answer 3

Nov 22, 2012 11:37 AM in response to Eric009

As you said the difference is ver small only about 2K, I would attribute this to small differences in the header.

With regards to size, and size on disk, this probably refers to the fact that while a file may be only XXX in size, it will use XXY on the disk because it has to use whole disk blocks, so even if it only use 1 byte in the last disk block which might be 1K in size it will be allocated that entire block.

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Answer 4

Eric009 Author

Level 1

9 points

Nov 22, 2012 12:15 PM in response to John Lockwood

Okay, thank you for your help!

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