The short answer: same audio, different wrapper
AIFF vs WAV sounds like it should be a quality debate, but it is not one. Put the same recording in an AIFF and a WAV and the audio inside the two files is identical: both formats store uncompressed PCM, the raw samples of the recording, with no lossy compression applied to either.
The wrapper still matters, just not for your ears. It decides what metadata the file can carry, which programs open it without complaint, and how much friction you hit moving files between machines. So the real question is not which format sounds better (neither does), it is which one your tools expect. This post covers where each format came from, the one real advantage AIFF has, and when each side wins.
Where AIFF and WAV came from
The split is historical, not technical. WAV is the Windows-origin standard, the uncompressed format PC audio software settled on long ago and never left. AIFF, short for Audio Interchange File Format, is Apple's equivalent and has long been the native uncompressed format on the Mac side. Both were built to do the same job: hold raw PCM audio in a simple container any program on the platform could read.
That parallel history explains nearly every difference you will run into today. Software with Windows roots defaults to WAV and sometimes only WAV. Software from the Apple world is usually comfortable with both but treats AIFF as family.
The audio inside is bit-identical
Uncompressed PCM means the file stores every sample at full resolution. At CD quality that works out to roughly 10 MB per minute, and it is the same roughly 10 MB per minute whether the extension reads .aiff or .wav. No size advantage, no fidelity advantage, no decoding quirk a listener could pick out.
That puts this comparison in a different category from the lossy debates. Choosing WAV over MP3 is a genuine quality decision with real tradeoffs in size and fidelity, and we walk through those in WAV vs MP3. Choosing AIFF over WAV changes nothing about the sound. It only changes the label on the box.
AIFF's quiet advantage: metadata
The one place AIFF genuinely pulls ahead is tagging. AIFF has better native tag support, so artist, title, album, and artwork tend to travel with the file reliably. WAV can carry metadata too, but support across software is patchy: tags you add in one program are not guaranteed to show up in another, and plenty of tools simply ignore them.
If you keep a library of full-quality files, that difference decides whether it looks like a library or a folder of mystery filenames. Tags also make housekeeping easier: our free Batch Renamer reads them (artist, title, album, even auto-detected key and BPM) and renames a whole folder of audio files in one pass, handing back a zip.
When Mac and Logic workflows prefer AIFF
If you live in Logic on a Mac, AIFF is the path of least resistance. Apple software reads and writes it natively, its tags behave properly across the ecosystem, and nothing on that side of the fence blinks at the extension. Bouncing stems as AIFF, archiving sessions as AIFF, tagging masters as AIFF: it all just works.
The honest caveat is that this comfort is local. The moment a file needs to leave your Mac and land on a collaborator's PC, the calculus flips.
When Windows software wants WAV
WAV is the universal answer. DAWs, video editors, samplers, and stock Windows utilities all open a WAV without a second thought. Plenty of Windows programs open AIFF fine too, but some do not, and you rarely find out which kind you sent until someone replies asking for a normal file.
That makes WAV the safe default any time audio leaves your own machine: stems for a collaborator, audio for a video edit, samples for a pack, deliverables for a client. Nobody gets asked to resend a WAV.
A simple rule of thumb
If your entire workflow lives on a Mac and you care about tags, work in AIFF. If files regularly leave your machine, or any part of your chain runs on Windows, work in WAV. If you are archiving and cannot decide, relax: both are lossless, both are the same size, and converting later costs nothing.
The only thing you can never get back is quality you threw away by working lossy. Keep your masters in either of these two formats and make MP3s at the end of the process, not the beginning.
Converting between AIFF and WAV loses nothing
Because both formats hold the same PCM audio, converting between them is a rewrap, not a re-encode. The samples that come out are the samples that went in. You can convert an AIFF to WAV for a Windows collaborator, get the file back later, and wrap it as AIFF again with no generation loss, which is never true of lossy formats.
Our free Audio Converter handles the swap with FFmpeg compiled to WebAssembly and converts MP3, WAV, M4A, FLAC, OGG, and AIFF in any direction. It runs in the browser, nothing uploaded, we never see the file. If you want the shortest path, there are dedicated pages for AIFF to WAV and WAV to AIFF.
One caveat before you convert: metadata does not always survive the trip as cleanly as the audio does. Since WAV's tag support is weaker, an AIFF with careful tags can come out the other side as a WAV with fewer of them. The audio itself is untouched either way.