The material diference between AIF and WAV is that the order of the
bytes is different ('big-endian' and 'little-endian'), reflecting their
roots respectively on Motorola (and SGI) and Intel platforms. 

The ability to be used as a sample is only 'built-in' if the required
special information chunks are included in the header. Such chunks are
defined for both formats, perhaps the use of AIFF files is just more
widespread. The decision to convert betweeen formats is essentially
pragmatic - what does your plaform and software support better? If you
lose that sampler information in the conversion (which could easily
happen, depending on the program), that may not help you. At present,
Csound only reads 'instrument' data for AIFF. Probably John, or I, or
somebody, will remedy that ere long. 

Conversion does not, however, change the audio data sonically in any way
(unless you are actually changing the sample rate or wordsize, of
course), unless there is some bug in the conversion program. So I cannot
account for any perceived difference under a 'scientific' paradigm. 

Richard Dobson


Sherlock wrote:
> 
> What is the differernce between AIFF and WAV? I can personally guess
> that AIFF can be used as samples in CSOUND rather that WAV because it
> can change in pitch.
> Second question: Should I make my sound wave files in AIF then convert
> to WAV?
> If I remember right, they sounded better that way.
> Sherlock
> 


-- 
Test your DAW with my Soundcard Attrition Page!
http://wkweb5.cableinet.co.uk/rwd (LU: 27th June 1999)