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Originally Posted by wutamess
I thought CD format was .wav files?
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From Wiki and other audio sites:
AIFF file: Short for Audio Interchange File Format, a common format for storing and transmitting sampled sound. The format was developed by Apple Computer and is the standard audio format for Macintosh computers. It is also used by Silicon Graphics Incorporated (SGI).
AIFF files generally end with a .AIF or .IEF extension.
The AIFF format does not support data compression so AIFF files tend to be large. However, there is another format called AIFF-Compressed (AIFF-C or AIFC) that supports compression ratios as high as 6:1.
WAV (or WAVE), short for Waveform audio format, is a Microsoft and IBM audio file format standard for storing audio on PCs. It is a variant of the RIFF bitstream format method for storing data in "chunks", and thus also close to the IFF and the AIFF format used on Amiga and Macintosh computers, respectively. It is the main format used on Windows systems for raw audio.
Both WAVs and AIFFs are compatible with Windows and Macintosh operating systems. The format takes into account some differences of the Intel CPU such as little-endian byte order. The RIFF format acts as a "wrapper" for various audio compression codecs.
Though a WAV file can hold compressed audio, the most common WAV format contains uncompressed audio in the pulse-code modulation (PCM) format. PCM audio is the standard audio file format for CDs at 44,100 samples per second, 16 bits per sample. Since PCM uses an uncompressed, lossless storage method, which keeps all the samples of an audio track, professional users or audio experts may use the WAV format for maximum audio quality. WAV audio can also be edited and manipulated with relative ease using software.