Convert AIF to ALAC — Free Online Converter

AIF is Apple's uncompressed PCM audio format from 1988, storing audio in big-endian byte order within an IFF-based container. As the native high-fidelity format of classic Mac OS, AIF preserves every audio sample without any compression. ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec) is Apple's lossless compression codec, open-sourced in 2011, which achieves roughly 50% file size reduction while preserving bit-perfect audio quality.

Converting AIF to ALAC compresses uncompressed PCM into lossless ALAC within an M4A container. This is a purely beneficial operation — identical audio quality at half the storage space, with full native playback support across all Apple devices including iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, and HomePod.

A CD-quality AIF file consumes approximately 10 MB per minute, while the same audio in ALAC occupies roughly 5-6 MB per minute — a 40-50% size reduction with zero quality loss. For a 60-minute album, that saves 240-300 MB of storage while keeping every sample perfectly intact. This is free space savings with no compromise.

ALAC also provides richer metadata support through its M4A container, including album art, lyrics, chapter markers, and iTunes-compatible tagging that AIF's simpler container cannot fully match. For anyone in the Apple ecosystem, ALAC is the strictly superior lossless format — smaller files, better metadata, and identical audio quality.

FFmpeg decodes the AIF container's big-endian PCM stream (pcm_s16be or pcm_s24be) to internal samples, then compresses using the ALAC encoder. ALAC uses adaptive linear prediction and entropy coding to achieve lossless compression — every sample reconstructs identically on playback. The output is wrapped in an M4A (MPEG-4 Part 14) container. Compression ratio varies by content: highly dynamic music compresses less (~55% of original), while speech or silence-heavy content compresses more (~35% of original).