Apple Lossless also known as Apple Lossless Encoder is an open audio codec for lossless compression of digital music developed by Apple in 2004. Audio data is stored in an MP4 container with m4a extension. This codec is similar to other lossless codecs such as FLAC. Every year this format becomes more popular as it is used in iTunes and in all media devices from Apple.
WAV is a container format for storing a record of a digitized audio stream without any compression. This format was developed by IBM and Microsoft in 1991 and was used in all versions of Windows. As the format uses audio streams without any compression, the files become very large in this format.