AIFF is one of the oldest digital audio formats, developed by Apple in 1988. AIFF stands for Audio Interchange File Format. Files with the .aiff extension are familiar to users of the Mac operating system. It has gained popularity among professional musicians and is supported by most audio software. AIFF uses lossless encoding, but there is also a variation of the AIFF-C lossy format (.aifc). On average, one minute of stereo sound in this format takes 10 MB.