AIFF.jl

A pure Julia package for reading and writing AIFF (Audio Interchange File Format) files — no external C libraries required.

Features

• Pure Julia — no dependency on libsndfile or other native libraries
• Read & Write uncompressed PCM AIFF files
• Bit depths: 8, 16, 24, 32-bit integer PCM
• Channels: mono, stereo, and arbitrary multi-channel
• Metadata: reads Marker, Instrument, Name, Author, Copyright, and Annotation chunks
• Playback: native audio playback on macOS, Linux, and Windows
• Round-trip safe: unknown chunks are preserved as raw bytes

Installation

using Pkg
Pkg.add(url="https://github.com/amemya/AIFF.jl")

Quick Start

Reading an AIFF file

using AIFF

# Returns (data, samplerate, nbits, extra)
result = aiffread("audio.aiff")

samples    = result.data        # Matrix{Float64}, rows=frames, cols=channels
samplerate = result.samplerate  # e.g. 44100.0
nbits      = result.nbits       # e.g. 16

The format keyword controls the output type:

# Float64 normalized to [-1.0, 1.0] (default)
result = aiffread("audio.aiff"; format="double")

# Raw integer PCM values (Int8, Int16, or Int32)
result = aiffread("audio.aiff"; format="native")

# Only read dimensions, skip sample data
result = aiffread("audio.aiff"; format="size")
result.data  # (nframes, nchannels)

Writing an AIFF file

using AIFF

# Generate a 1-second 440 Hz sine wave (mono, 44100 Hz)
t = (0:44099) / 44100
samples = sin.(2π * 440 .* t)

aiffwrite("tone.aiff", samples, 44100; nbits=16)

Stereo and multi-channel audio uses a matrix where each column is a channel:

left  = sin.(2π * 440 .* t)
right = sin.(2π * 880 .* t)
stereo = hcat(left, right)

aiffwrite("stereo.aiff", stereo, 44100; nbits=24)

Playing audio

# Play an AIFF file
aiffplay("tone.aiff")

# Play data directly (matrix + sample rate)
aiffplay(samples, 44100)

OS	Backend
macOS	Core Audio (AudioQueue)
Linux	PulseAudio (libpulse-simple)
Windows	Win32 PlaySound (Winmm.dll)

Accessing metadata

result = aiffread("audio.aiff")

# Metadata is stored in result.extra (Dict{Symbol, Any})
markers     = result.extra[:markers]      # Vector{AIFFMarker}
annotations = result.extra[:annotations]  # Vector{String}

# Optional fields (present only if the chunk exists in the file)
name       = get(result.extra, :name, nothing)        # String
author     = get(result.extra, :author, nothing)       # String
copyright  = get(result.extra, :copyright, nothing)    # String
instrument = get(result.extra, :instrument, nothing)   # AIFFInstrument

Supported Chunks

Chunk ID	Type	Description
COMM	Required	Common — channels, sample frames, bit depth, sample rate
SSND	Required	Sound Data — PCM audio samples
MARK	Optional	Markers — named positions in the audio
INST	Optional	Instrument — loop points, MIDI note range, velocity
NAME	Optional	Name of the sampled sound
AUTH	Optional	Author / creator
(c)	Optional	Copyright notice
ANNO	Optional	Annotation (free-text comment)

Unknown chunks are preserved as AIFFChunk objects for round-trip fidelity.

Limitations

• AIFF only — AIFF-C (compressed) is not yet supported
• PCM only — no floating-point or compressed audio encoding
• Write currently outputs only COMM + SSND chunks (no metadata writing yet)
• Playback requires platform audio libraries (pre-installed on most systems)

License

MIT