Meredith was heard:

> One fact being:  aiff and wave file formats are UNIX and IBM native, not
> Macintosh file formats.

Not exactly.  The AIFF format was (and I believe still is) copyrighted by
Apple Computer.  It was developed as a second-generation audio file format,
I believe to replace Apple's 8-bit SND resource format.  Internally, it is
quite different from the UNIX-style audio file types (NeXT, IRCAM, etc.)
which generally have a simple header (1024 bytes) followed by data.  AIFF
has multiple chunks of data of different sizes which can store different
kinds of information, including compression methods, pitch (for samplers or
loscils),  etc.

WAV was developed by Microsoft as their sound file format.  It too is not
"native" to UNIX.  The endian order on the data bytes are reversed between
most UNIX systems and Wintel systems.  Only the Berkeley-style
(IRCAM/UCSD/NeXT/Sun) formats are truly native to UNIX.

But it is all a moot point.  The demands of the marketplace have made AIFF,
WAV, and IRCAM/UNIX formats accessable from MacOS, Wintel and most UNIX
platforms.

Stephen David Beck
Associate Professor of Composition and Computer Music
School of Music
Louisiana State University
Baton Rouge, LA 70803
USA