Convert AIFF to ALAC — Free Online Converter

Both AIFF and ALAC are Apple formats that store audio at full quality, but they take fundamentally different approaches. AIFF stores raw uncompressed PCM — every sample is written directly, consuming about 10 MB per minute. ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec) compresses the same data losslessly, achieving 50-60% size reduction while guaranteeing bit-for-bit perfect reproduction when decoded. Converting AIFF to ALAC halves your storage without sacrificing a single sample.

AIFF files are wastefully large for storage and library management. A 500-song AIFF library takes roughly 30 GB, while the same library in ALAC fits in about 15 GB with absolutely zero quality difference. ALAC plays natively on every Apple device — iPhone, iPad, Mac, HomePod, Apple TV, AirPods Max — and is the format Apple Music uses for lossless streaming. There is no reason to keep files as AIFF unless you need zero-decode-overhead for real-time DAW playback.

FFmpeg reads the AIFF PCM data and encodes it using the ALAC encoder into an M4A container. ALAC uses adaptive linear prediction and Rice coding to compress PCM samples losslessly. The compression ratio varies by content — simple audio (silence, sine waves) compresses better than complex audio (dense orchestral music). Typical ratios: 40-60% of the AIFF size. All sample rates and bit depths (16, 24, 32-bit) are preserved exactly.