The Core Audio Format is a container for storing audio, developed by
Apple Inc.
Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Apple is the largest technology company by revenue (totaling in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company ...
It is compatible with
Mac OS X 10.4
Mac OS X Tiger (version 10.4) is the 5th major release of macOS, Apple's desktop and server operating system for Mac computers. Tiger was released to the public on April 29, 2005 for US$129.95 as the successor to Mac OS X 10.3 Panther. Som ...
and higher;
Mac OS X 10.3 needs
QuickTime 7 to be installed.
Core Audio Format is designed to overcome limitations of older digital audio formats, including
AIFF
Audio Interchange File Format (AIFF) is an audio file format standard used for storing sound data for personal computers and other electronic audio devices. The format was developed by Apple Inc. in 1988 based on Electronic Arts' Interchange File ...
and
WAV
Waveform Audio File Format (WAVE, or WAV due to its filename extension; pronounced "wave") is an audio file format standard, developed by IBM and Microsoft, for storing an audio bitstream on PCs. It is the main format used on Microsoft Wind ...
. Just like the QuickTime
.mov container, a .caf container can contain many different audio formats, metadata tracks, and much more data. Like the
RF64
{{Infobox file format
, name = RF64
, icon =
, iconcaption =
, icon_size =
, screenshot =
, screenshot_size =
, caption =
, _noextcode =
, extension =
, _nomimecode =
, mime =
, type_code =
, uniform_type =
, c ...
, it is not limited to a 4
GB file size and a single .caf file can theoretically save hundreds of years of recorded audio due to its use of 64-bit file offsets.
,
Soundtrack Pro
Soundtrack Pro is a discontinued music composing and audio editing application made by Apple Inc. featured in Logic Studio and Final Cut Studio that included a collection of just over 5,000 royalty free professional instrument loops and sound e ...
, and
Logic Studio
Logic Studio is a discontinued professional music production suite by Apple Inc. The first version of Logic Studio was unveiled on September 12, 2007.
It claims to be the largest collection of modeled instruments, sampler instruments, effect plu ...
use the .caf format for their loop and sound effects library, particularly for surround-sound audio compressed with the
Apple Lossless
The Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC), also known as Apple Lossless, or Apple Lossless Encoder (ALE), is an audio coding format, and its reference audio codec implementation, developed by Apple Inc. for lossless data compression of digital music ...
(ALAC) codec.
References
External links
Apple Core Audio Format Specification 1.0
{{computing-stub
Apple Inc. software
Audio file formats
Digital container formats