toaiff

Right-click lossless audio in Finder and convert it to AIFF — no quality loss, all artwork and metadata preserved, originals moved to the Trash. Works on a single file, a selection, or a whole folder (recursing into subfolders). Lossy and non-audio files are left untouched.

It also enriches the ID3 tags as it converts — backfilling a catalog number, track/disc numbers, and folder artwork from the file/folder names, and normalizing feat.→ft. — without ever overwriting tags the source already has.

Important

Originals are moved to the Trash (recoverable), never hard-deleted, and only after the new .aiff is verified readable. A failed conversion never loses the source. Still, try it on a copy first if you're cautious.

Requirements

• macOS 13 (Ventura) or later — tested on Sequoia and Tahoe
• ffmpeg (installed automatically by Homebrew, below)

Install

Homebrew (recommended)

brew install jzstern/tap/toaiff

This installs the toaiff CLI and pulls in ffmpeg automatically.

Or install manually from source

git clone https://github.com/jzstern/toaiff.git
cd toaiff && ./install.sh

Copies the CLI to ~/.local/bin/toaiff. ffmpeg is installed via Homebrew on first run if it isn't already present.

Add the Finder right-click action (one time)

macOS won't let an installer register a Finder Quick Action — you add the bundled Shortcut yourself. It takes about a minute:

1. Double-click shortcut/→ aiff.shortcut → Add Shortcut. It's pre-built to receive Files & Folders and run the CLI.
2. Enable it. macOS imports Shortcut Quick Actions disabled. Turn it on in System Settings ▸ Login Items & Extensions ▸ Finder → toggle → aiff on. (Easy to miss — without it the action won't appear in the menu.)
3. Right-click any lossless files or a folder in Finder → Quick Actions ▸ → aiff.
4. First run only: macOS asks to let the shortcut access the file(s) — click Always Allow. Silent thereafter.

It works in protected folders (Desktop / Documents / Downloads) with no Full Disk Access needed — see How it works.

Use from the terminal

toaiff ~/Music/Album            # recurse a folder
toaiff track.flac other.wav     # one or more files
toaiff --dry-run ~/Music/Album  # preview tags/conversions, write nothing
toaiff --no-enrich ~/Music/Album  # pure transcode, skip all tag enrichment
toaiff --version

What gets converted

Conversion is decided by the actual audio codec, not the file extension, so a .m4a holding ALAC is converted while a .m4a holding AAC is skipped.

Input	Action
FLAC, ALAC, WavPack, Monkey's Audio (APE), TAK, TTA, MLP/TrueHD	convert → AIFF
WAV / raw PCM	convert → AIFF (uncompressed passthrough)
Already AIFF	skipped
MP3, AAC, Vorbis, Opus, AC3, WMA, … (lossy)	skipped
DSD (.dsf/.dff)	skipped (no clean lossless PCM mapping)
Non-audio files	ignored

How quality is preserved

ffmpeg's AIFF encoder defaults to 16-bit, which would silently downsample 24-bit masters. toaiff reads each source's true bit depth and selects a PCM target that is always ≥ the source depth:

Source	AIFF target
8-bit	pcm_s8
16-bit	pcm_s16be
24-bit	pcm_s24be
32-bit int	pcm_s32be
32/64-bit float	pcm_f32be / pcm_f64be (AIFF-C)

Sample rate and channel layout are never touched (no resampling). Tags and embedded cover art are carried over via -map_metadata and an ID3v2 chunk; if the AIFF container rejects an embedded image, the audio still converts and the artwork is dropped with a logged note.

Metadata enrichment

During conversion, toaiff derives tags that live in the file/folder names but are missing from the audio tags, and applies one normalization. Everything is fill-gaps-only — an existing tag is never overwritten — and enrichment is on by default. Turn it off with --no-enrich (or TOAIFF_NO_ENRICH=1) for a pure transcode.

Enrichment	Source	Written to	Rule
Catalog number	album folder name, e.g. [SHA300], (snf137), {LLR004}, bare USB002	grouping (uppercased, e.g. SHA300)	only if no grouping tag
Track / disc	leading filename token: 01 - …, 001 - …, (01 - 02) …	track / disc	leading number only (trailing numbers in a title ignored); only if absent
feat.→ft.	the title itself	title	word-anchored (FEISTY is safe); the one value that is edited, not gap-filled
Folder artwork	cover/folder/front.jpg/png beside the file	embedded cover	only if the source has no embedded art

Catalog detection rejects look-alikes in the same brackets — format/quality words ([WEB FLAC], [FLAC 24]), years ((2026)), release types ([EP]), and barcodes ({…, 5056818805226}). The heuristics are tuned to scene/label folder naming; on a 7,988-folder test library it found ~5,500 real catalog numbers with a single false positive. If your library is named differently and you don't want the guesswork, run with --no-enrich.

Preview exactly what each file would get, without writing anything:

toaiff --dry-run ~/Music/Album
# toaiff: would convert 02 - Lion Soul (feat. X).flac (pcm_s24be) [grouping=ARTKL081 track=2 title=Lion Soul (ft. X) art=cover.png]

How it works

ffmpeg writes the .aiff directly to its final path, and the original is trashed only after the output is verified to be a readable AIFF. On any failure the original is left exactly as it was.

Why it works in protected folders without Full Disk Access

A Finder Quick Action runs the script sandboxed under ShortcutsMacHelper. In TCC-protected folders (Desktop / Documents / Downloads) that sandbox lets a child process (ffmpeg) create files but won't let the shell rename or delete a file ffmpeg made. So toaiff has ffmpeg write the .aiff directly to its final name (no temp + rename) and trashes the original via NSFileManager, which the Quick Action's scoped access to the selected file permits. That's also why a true Quick Action here must be a Shortcut: a hand-built Automator .workflow only ever registers as a Service on recent macOS.

Logging

One central log at ~/Library/Logs/toaiff.log, appended to no matter where the action runs. By default only errors are logged, so a clean run writes nothing. For a full trace of every run / conversion / skip:

toaiff --debug ~/Music/Album        # or set TOAIFF_DEBUG=1
tail -f ~/Library/Logs/toaiff.log

To debug the Finder Quick Action, add --debug to its Run Shell Script line temporarily — change exec toaiff --notify "$@" to exec toaiff --notify --debug "$@".

Configuration

Flag	Env	Effect
--no-enrich	TOAIFF_NO_ENRICH	Pure transcode; skip all tag enrichment.
--dry-run	—	Preview the tag/conversion plan; write and trash nothing.
--debug	TOAIFF_DEBUG	Log every run/conversion/skip, not just errors.
—	TOAIFF_KEEP_ORIGINALS	Convert without trashing originals (cautious first pass).
—	TOAIFF_NO_NOTIFY	Suppress the completion notification even with --notify.
—	TOAIFF_LOG	Override the log file path (used by the test suite).

No stray output files: as a Finder Quick Action the script runs with --notify and no terminal, so it writes nothing to stdout/stderr — which the Shortcuts "Run Shell Script" action would otherwise save as a stdout.txt / stderr.txt beside your files. Results come from the notification and the log.

Uninstall

brew uninstall toaiff                 # or: rm ~/.local/bin/toaiff
rm -f ~/Library/Logs/toaiff.log

Then delete the → aiff shortcut in Shortcuts.app and toggle it off in System Settings ▸ Login Items & Extensions ▸ Finder.

Contributing

Issues and PRs welcome. Run the test suite before submitting:

./tests/run.sh

It generates fixtures with ffmpeg and exercises depth preservation, metadata and artwork retention, enrichment + decoy rejection, recursion, skipping, and logging — all non-destructively (no files are trashed). CI runs the same suite on every PR.

License

MIT