M4A to AIFF
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| - Information about AIFF |
| Id |
| 2 |
| File extension |
| aiff |
| File category |
| Audio |
| Stands for |
| Audio Interchange File Format |
| Developer |
| Apple Inc. |
| Overview |
| AIFF is an uncompressed audio file format. It keeps the original file without losing any data. This is the main reason why these files require more storage space. One minute-long audio requires nearly 10MB space. It is widely used by Apple Macintosh/Apple Mac and also musicians use this format for their recordings. Exact copies of music can be formed using this format with the added benefit of sound quality, which is well maintained in these files. Though it follows lossless format(not compressed), yet, there is another variant of it named AIFF-C developed by Apple afterwards and it is the compressed version. The only disadvantage of these files is a large size. |
| Technical description |
| Mostly AIFF files have uncompressed Pulse Code Modulation(PCM) data which means at regular intervals the amplitude of the analog signal is reduced from continuous-time signal to a discrete-time signal and every sample is quantized to the closest value. An AFF file has various parts which are known as chunks and each chunk has its own ID which is mostly termed as FourCC. This ID is a sequel of four bytes which distinctly identify data formats. The several chunks found in this format are Common, Sound data, Marker, Instrument, Comment, Name, Author, Copyright, Annotation, Audio recording, MIDI data, Application, and ID3. The first two chunks are essential every time(Common chunk and Sound data Chunk). Lastly, these files have the capability of storing Metadata in five chunks-Name, author, comment, annotation and copyright. Metadata delivers information about the data that is data about data. |
| Links |
| wikipedia.org |
| - Information about M4A |
| Id |
| 4 |
| File extension |
| m4a |
| File category |
| Audio |
| Stands for |
| MPEG-4 PART 14 or MPEG-4 Audio |
| Developer |
| Apple |
| Overview |
| It is an audio file which uses AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) compression. Also, it is one of the formats of MPEG-4. It should be noted that MPEG-4 codec is used both for video and Audio. But M4A is specially designed by Apple for audio files only that is why it is used to store audiobooks, podcasts and songs. As sound files are encoded using AAC compression and this results in a reduction of file size and it also produces a very good quality of audio. Whenever somebody purchases music from the iTunes store then it is always available in this format. Many believe that MP4 and M4A are similar extensions, however, it’s not the truth. MP4 files can store both Audio and video files whereas the other one is entirely made for Audio files. |
| Technical description |
| These files are improved version of MP3 as it has the ability to store data without any loss. The audio files are completely reversible that is they can be inverted to their original copies with the same size. Besides this, these files does not have copyright protection whereas MP4 files are protected and they use DRM(Digital Rights Management) technology to enforce this protection policy. Due to this, one can copy these audio files effortlessly. These files have come with advanced features which include smaller sample block sizes, perception-based compression and bigger block sizes in stationary signals. There are a number of applications that support this extension. For example:- Microsoft Windows Media Player, VLC Media Player, Quicktime player, Microsoft Zune and Apple iTunes etc. |
| Links |
| wikipedia.org |
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