What is AIFF?
AIFF is Apple's uncompressed audio format - WAV's counterpart from the Mac side of the world, and still what Logic and older Pro Tools sessions use. It stores its sample rate as an 80-bit extended float, a piece of 1980s exotica most converters get wrong.
What is WAV?
WAV is raw PCM audio with a small header - uncompressed, unprocessed and enormous, at roughly ten megabytes a minute for CD-quality stereo. It is the working format of audio editing, sampling and speech tooling, where every stage wants the samples themselves rather than a codec's approximation.