IFF

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File Format
Name IFF
Ontology
Extension(s) .iff, many others
LoCFDD fdd000115
PRONOM x-fmt/157
This article is about the generic IFF metaformat. For the IFF image format, see ILBM.

IFF (Interchange File Format) is a file format introduced by Electronic Arts on the Commodore Amiga computer. Its structure is similar to RIFF or PNG, using various self-contained chunks to contain different data. Multi-byte numeric values are big-endian.

Although IFF is most commonly used as an image format (using the file extension .iff), it can actually hold a lot of different data types. Some examples of IFF files are

  • ILBM Interleaved bitmap image
  • XMI XMidi music files
  • 8SVX audio sample data
  • SX2 Propellerhead Reason NN-XT patches
  • ANIM

Some other formats are largely or heavily influenced by the IFF standard, but are not compatible. These include, for example:

  • Erlang BEAM compiled modules[1][2]: Uses 4 byte alignment instead of 2 byte, and the root chunk has a different ID (FOR1 instead of FORM)
  • Microsoft's RIFF and RIFX formats are based on IFF (RIFF uses little-endian byte order instead, and the root chunk is called RIFF instead of FORM)
  • Apple's AIFF and AIFC formats are similar to IFF/RIFF as well
  • Maya IFF

Identification

IFF files begin with the ASCII characters "FORM".

References

  1. http://www.erlang.org/doc/man/beam_lib.html
  2. http://www.erlang.se/~bjorn/beam_file_format.html

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