HEVC to AIFF Converter

Pulling an AIF Out of an HEVC File: What This Tutorial Covers

.aif is the audio format Apple's own tools reach for first — it is what Logic Pro, GarageBand, QuickTime and Pro Tools import without a murmur, because it stores plain uncompressed samples with no codec to unpack. This tutorial covers getting one out of an HEVC file: how to check first whether your .hevc even has an audio track, what each of the four Audio Codec choices actually writes into the file, and the size arithmetic that catches people out the first time they export twenty minutes of uncompressed audio.

How to Convert HEVC to AIF

1. Upload Your HEVC File: Drag and drop your .hevc onto the page, or click "Add Files" to browse for it. Queue several files if you want them all converted under one set of settings.
2. Pick an Audio Codec: The Audio Codec group offers four choices — PCM 16-bit Big Endian (the default, and the classic AIFF sample format), PCM 16-bit Little Endian, PCM A-law, and PCM mu-law. Stay on Big Endian unless you specifically need one of the others.
3. Set Audio Channel, Audio Sample Rate, and Trim: Audio Channel takes Original, Mono, or Stereo; Audio Sample Rate takes Original or a fixed rate up to 48000 Hz. Both drive the file size directly, because AIF stores raw samples. Leave Trim on Unchanged for the whole timeline, or switch it to enter a Start time and Duration.
4. Convert and Download: Click Convert and save the .aif. Files are uploaded over an encrypted connection, processed on our servers, and deleted automatically after a few hours — no sign-up, no watermark, never shared or made public.

Step Zero: Does Your .hevc Actually Contain Audio?

HEVC — High Efficiency Video Coding, published as ITU-T Recommendation H.265 in April 2013 — is a video codec, so a genuine H.265 elementary stream carries picture and nothing else. Plenty of files named .hevc are not elementary streams though: converters that target HEVC commonly write a Matroska container under the .hevc name, and hand-renamed .mp4 files turn up constantly. Media tools go by the bytes, not the extension, so the two behave completely differently on this page.

Thirty seconds in VLC settles it. If you hear sound, this page will do exactly what you want. If the picture plays silently, the audio you are after is still sitting in whatever container the video was demuxed from, and that is the file to upload.

Walk-through: What Each Audio Codec Choice Writes

AIF has no bitrate and no quality slider — that is why this page shows no compression controls at all. What it does have is a choice of sample format, and that choice changes the container header as well as the data. AIFF as Apple defined it in 1988 stores big-endian linear PCM; the 1991 AIFF-C revision added a compression-type field so the same chunk layout could hold other sample formats. Picking anything other than the default therefore writes an AIFF-C file that still carries the .aif name.

In practice the default is the right answer nearly every time. A-law and mu-law are the ITU-T G.711 telephony codings — 8-bit companded audio designed for voice circuits, not music; they halve the file at an obvious cost in fidelity. Little-endian PCM exists for tools that would rather not byte-swap, but it is the one variant some older AIFF readers reject.

Size follows straight from the settings, with no compression to soften it: 16-bit stereo at 44.1 kHz is 176,400 bytes per second, or about 10.6 MB per minute. Mono halves that to roughly 5.3 MB per minute, and so does either 8-bit companded codec. A one-hour recording at the default settings is therefore around 635 MB — which is the moment most people decide that HEVC to MP3 is the better tool for the job.

Common Errors and How to Fix Them

• "The conversion failed and nothing downloaded" — The upload is a video-only H.265 stream, so there is no audio for the encoder to write. Convert the original container instead: MP4 to AIF, MKV to AIF, or MOV to AIF.
• "The file is enormous" — Expected: AIF is uncompressed. Trim to the section you need, drop Audio Channel to Mono if the source is speech, or use a compressed target instead.
• "An old app refuses to open my .aif" — Some legacy readers only accept the classic big-endian AIFF form. If you changed Audio Codec away from PCM 16-bit Big Endian, the file is technically AIFF-C; convert again on the default and it should load.
• "The audio sounds thin or muffled" — Check Audio Sample Rate. Forcing 8000 or 12000 Hz throws away everything above roughly 4 or 6 kHz, and A-law/mu-law add their own 8-bit quantisation on top. Original or 44100 Hz is what you want for music.
• "I expected better quality than the MP4 version" — AIF cannot restore detail that a lossy encoder already discarded. It preserves what it is given, which is not the same thing.

When This Doesn't Work

If the file really is a bare H.265 stream, no converter can extract audio from it, because those bytes were never written. The soundtrack is still in the .mp4, .mkv, or .mov the stream was demuxed out of — upload that instead. DRM-protected downloads will not decode here either. And if what you actually wanted was the picture rather than the sound, HEVC to MP4 re-encodes the stream into a container that ordinary players open.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is .aif the same thing as .aiff?

Yes. Both name Apple's Audio Interchange File Format, introduced in 1988 and built on the chunk layout of Electronic Arts' IFF. .aif is simply the three-letter DOS-era spelling of .aiff, and every player and DAW that opens one opens the other. Choosing this page over HEVC to AIFF changes the filename you get back, not the bytes inside it.

Why did my HEVC to AIF conversion fail?

Almost certainly because the file is a video-only H.265 elementary stream, which contains no audio to extract. An audio-only target needs an audio stream, and when there is none the job stops rather than writing a silent file. Play the file first: sound in VLC means it will convert, silence means you need the original container it came from.

Which Audio Codec should I leave selected?

PCM 16-bit Big Endian, unless you have a specific reason not to. It is the default here and the sample format AIFF was designed around, and it produces the classic FORM…AIFF file that even elderly Mac audio software understands. We converted the same clip four times, once per codec choice, and read the container headers back: only the Big Endian export wrote a plain AIFF header — the other three wrote AIFF-C headers with an FVER chunk and a compression tag of sowt, alaw, or ulaw.

Where are the bitrate and quality settings?

There aren't any, and that is not an omission. AIF stores linear PCM samples verbatim, so there is no rate to choose — the only levers on file size are the sample rate, the channel count, the bit depth implied by your codec choice, and how much of the timeline you keep. That is why this page hides the compression controls that appear on lossy targets.

How big will the file be?

Multiply sample rate by bytes per sample by channels. The default 16-bit stereo at 44.1 kHz works out at 176,400 bytes per second — roughly 10.6 MB per minute, or 635 MB per hour. Mono halves it, as does choosing A-law or mu-law, since both store 8 bits per sample instead of 16.

Will the AIF sound better than an MP3 of the same video?

It will not add anything, but it will not take anything away either. Audio inside a video container is normally already lossy — usually AAC — so the AIF captures the decoded result exactly without a second round of compression. That matters when the file is going into an editor and will be processed further; it makes no audible difference if you are only going to listen to it once.

What sample rate should I choose?

Leave it on Original in almost every case, which keeps whatever the source recorded, most often 48000 Hz from a camera or 44100 Hz from a music source. Force a rate only when a downstream tool insists on one. Resampling to a lower rate permanently discards the top of the frequency range, and resampling upward adds bytes without adding information.

Can I get the video out of this page as well?

No — AIF is an audio-only format, so the picture is discarded. Use HEVC to MP4 for a file that plays on phones, TVs, and browsers, or HEVC to MKV if you are feeding a media server that wants multiple audio and subtitle tracks.

What happens to my file after the conversion?

It is uploaded over an encrypted connection, processed on our servers, and deleted automatically after a few hours. Nothing is shared or made public, there is no account to create, and no watermark is added. For long 4K sources the practical constraint is upload time over your own connection rather than anything at the conversion end.