AV1 to AIFF Converter

Extracting AIFF Audio from AV1 Video: What This Tutorial Covers

This is for anyone holding an AV1-encoded video who needs the soundtrack on its own as uncompressed PCM — usually because a Mac DAW such as Logic Pro, GarageBand or Pro Tools is waiting for it. The output is audio only; the picture is discarded. Along the way this tutorial covers the four PCM flavours the converter offers and the one that produces a true AIFF rather than an AIFF-C, why the result is so much larger than the video it came from, and the honest limit of putting already-compressed audio into a lossless container.

How to Convert AV1 to AIFF

1. Upload Your AV1 File: Drag and drop your .av1 file onto the page, or click "+ Add Files" to browse. This page accepts .av1 files specifically — an AV1 video inside another wrapper needs the converter matching that extension, such as MKV to AIFF or MP4 to AIFF. Several files can be queued and extracted in one pass.
2. Pick the Audio Codec: Open the options panel and choose under Audio Codec. The default is PCM 16-bit Big Endian, the classic CD-grade AIFF flavour every Mac audio application expects. PCM 16-bit Little Endian, PCM A-law and PCM mu-law are also offered — see the walk-through below for what each one actually writes.
3. Set Audio Sample Rate, Audio Channel or Trim (Optional): Leave Audio Sample Rate on ORIGINAL to avoid resampling, or force 44100 HZ for a CD target and 48000 HZ for a video-post target. Audio Channel offers ORIGINAL, MONO or STEREO — mono halves the file on speech material. Trim takes a Start time and Duration in seconds or HH:MM:SS.sss.
4. Convert and Download: Click Convert and save the .aiff file individually or as a ZIP. Files upload over an encrypted connection, are converted on our servers and are deleted automatically a few hours later. No sign-up, no watermark.

Walk-through: Which PCM Flavour to Choose

All four options write a file with an .aiff extension, but they do not all write the same kind of file. Only 16-bit big-endian PCM produces a file whose header declares the original AIFF form; the other three produce AIFF-C, the 1991 extension of the format that allows alternative sample encodings. We confirmed this against the same FFmpeg encoders our servers use — the first four bytes after the FORM chunk read AIFF for the default and AIFC for the rest.

The two companded options halve the file size, but they do it by throwing away resolution — they encode each sample as one logarithmically scaled byte, which is telephone quality by construction. If your goal is a smaller file rather than a compatible one, a lossy codec will sound far better at the same size: try AV1 to M4A or AV1 to MP3 instead.

What the AIFF Will Weigh

Uncompressed PCM has no surprises in it — the size is simply sample rate × bytes per sample × channels × duration. That arithmetic is why an extracted soundtrack can dwarf the video it came out of.

For comparison, the audio track inside your AV1 file is probably running at 96–256 kbps, so a default extraction produces roughly six to fifteen times as many bytes as the audio you started with — without adding a single bit of information.

Common Errors and How to Fix Them

• "The AIFF is bigger than the whole video" — expected on a short clip with a long soundtrack. AIFF stores raw samples; AV1 files carry compressed audio. Use the size table above to pick a lower rate or mono, or switch to a compressed target such as AV1 to M4A.
• "My app says the file is AIFF-C, not AIFF" — you selected something other than PCM 16-bit Big Endian. Re-convert with the default codec to get a plain AIFF.
• "The output is silent, or the job fails" — the source has no audio track to extract. Silent screen recordings and animation exports frequently have none; play the file in VLC first and check that it actually makes a sound.
• "A Windows tool refuses the AIFF" — a few older utilities never handled big-endian samples. Either pick PCM 16-bit Little Endian, or convert to AV1 to WAV, which is little-endian by convention and the safer Windows handoff.
• "It sounds identical to the video, not better" — correct, and unavoidable. See the section below.

When This Doesn't Work — the Lossless-Container Honesty

AV1 is a video codec and carries no audio of its own. The soundtrack riding alongside it in a container is virtually always a lossy stream — AAC or Opus — so decoding it into uncompressed PCM gives you a large, bit-exact copy of already-compressed audio. Nothing that the original encoder discarded comes back, and no setting on this page changes that. What you gain is downstream: once the audio is PCM, every edit, effect and export in your DAW is lossless, so the lossy generation is paid once instead of accumulating with each save. If what you actually want is a small file rather than an editing master, a lossy target is the honest choice. And if the source is DRM-protected, truncated or otherwise damaged, extraction fails regardless of output format — the stream has to decode before it can be rewritten.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does converting AV1 to AIFF improve the audio quality?

No. AIFF is an uncompressed container, but a container cannot restore what a codec removed. The audio alongside an AV1 video is lossy AAC or Opus, so the AIFF is a bit-exact decode of that already-compressed stream, artefacts included. What AIFF does prevent is further loss: editing and re-exporting PCM in a DAW adds no new compression damage, which is exactly why audio engineers work in it.

Why is the AIFF so much larger than my AV1 file?

Because you are trading compression for raw samples. The audio inside the AV1 is perhaps 96–256 kbps, while 16-bit 44.1 kHz stereo PCM runs at 1,411 kbps — about 10.6 MB every minute, or 635 MB an hour. A one-hour lecture recording with a modest AV1 video track can easily produce an AIFF several times the size of the source file. That is the format working as intended, not a fault.

Which PCM flavour does this output by default, and why big-endian?

PCM 16-bit Big Endian. Big-endian byte order is baked into the original AIFF specification, which Apple defined in 1988 on the Motorola 68000-based Macintosh and built on Electronic Arts' IFF chunk structure. It is what Logic Pro, GarageBand and Final Cut Pro expect to see, and it is the only one of the four choices here that produces a plain AIFF file rather than an AIFF-C.

Why did my file open as AIFF-C instead of AIFF?

Because AIFF-C is what the format requires for anything other than plain big-endian PCM. AIFF-C (the "C" is for compressed) was added in 1991 so the container could carry alternative sample encodings, and it stores a four-character compression identifier in the header. Choosing PCM 16-bit Little Endian, PCM A-law or PCM mu-law therefore writes an AIFC-form file even though the extension stays .aiff. Modern audio software reads both; a handful of very old utilities only handle the original form. Stay on the default if that matters.

Should I pick AIFF or WAV when extracting from AV1?

They are equivalent in quality — both hold uncompressed PCM, and a 16-bit 44.1 kHz stereo file is the same size either way. The difference is convention: AIFF is big-endian and native to the macOS audio world, while WAV is little-endian and the default across Windows tooling. Pick AIFF if the file is going into a Mac DAW; use AV1 to WAV for a Windows handoff, and AIFF to WAV if you need to switch later.

Can I extract just one section of the video's audio?

Yes. Set Trim to Time Range and enter a Start time and a Duration — both accept plain seconds (for example 12.5) or HH:MM:SS.sss (00:02:15.250). That is the efficient way to lift one song out of a concert capture, a single line of dialogue from a screen recording, or one chapter of a long lecture without exporting and then editing down a huge PCM file.

What happens if my AV1 file has no sound?

There is nothing to extract, and the job will not produce usable audio. Silent screen recordings, rendered animations and clips exported as video-only have no audio track at all. Check first by playing the file in VLC, or by running ffprobe file.av1 and looking for an audio stream in the output. If there is none, no converter can create one.

My AV1 video is inside an .mp4 or .mkv file — can I use this page?

No, this converter takes .av1 files. If your AV1 video is wrapped in another container, use the page that matches the actual extension — MKV to AIFF or MP4 to AIFF — and the result is exactly the same. The extension simply tells us which demuxer to open the file with before the audio track is decoded.

How long do you keep my uploaded AV1 file?

Your file is uploaded over an encrypted connection, processed on our servers, and deleted automatically a few hours after the job finishes — never shared, never made public, with no sign-up and no watermark. On long videos the practical constraint is upload size and time rather than the extraction, so trimming to the section you need before converting saves you far more waiting than any codec setting will.