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Apple Lossless Audio Codec is now open source (Apache license)

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Re: Apple Lossless Audio Codec is now open source (Apache license)

#121

Post by tripzilch »

sjwright wrote: post #86
AndyKelley wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can... easily. And it matters to me. My hearing is average, and I have HD280Pro Seinheisers which are pretty standard headphones. Maybe it has something to do with the music genre that I like - techno, trance, dubstep, elecronic, etc. This stuff is delicately mastered in the studio and I can tell when the sound isn't reconstructed well upon playback. I'd love to do a blind hearing test if you can set one up - but y…

> This stuff is delicately mastered in the studio And football is the sport of delicately manoeuvring your opponent onto the grass. And heroin is a drug that delicately shifts your brain chemistry. And a chainsaw delicately tickles tree trunks.

Ok so you don't like electronic dance/club music. We get it.

I gotta say, I disagree with the guy below me being downvoted, because when I read this "troll" was the first thing that sprang to my mind as well.

I don't disagree with you on the matter that you can't tell the difference between quality lossy and lossless recordings, btw. As long as they're the end-product and not being used for further processing.

Which is one of the rare scenarios in which is actually does make sense to prefer a vinyl copy over a high quality lossy compressed file, if you can't find the lossless digital version.

No you won't be able to hear the difference in the version you bought, but it will make a difference if you intend to work with the data and transform it into something else, because then it is possible that sounds that were thrown away by the lossy codec because no human "golden ear" could hear them, contexts shift and they come into hearing ranges again. But the data is lost, so there's something missing instead.

With a digital lossless copy, or with vinyl, you know you're also getting the inaudible bits, even if you can't hear them.

And if you're just going to listen to the track, sure, get the quality lossy codec.

But if you're doing remixes, you're going to want the inaudible bits too, because you don't know if you'll need them or not.

Lossy compression is for end products, not half products.

Re: Apple Lossless Audio Codec is now open source (Apache license)

#122

Post by rsynnott »

BuddhaSource wrote: post #58

A successor to MP3. We know there are better formats than MP3 today but getting mass adoption is difficult. Open source ALAC will give birth to new 3rd party supporting players, not to mention apple products already supports it & we have higher chances of mass adoption.

No, AAC was a successor to MP3, about a decade ago. This is a lossless format, so not really suitable for the same roles.

Re: Apple Lossless Audio Codec is now open source (Apache license)

#123

Post by b3b0p »

frou_dh wrote: post #53
b3b0p wrote: post #49

What I don't get is why don't places like iTunes and Amazon offer Lossless options for downloading? I mean, here they are bragging about 720p, 1080p, high definition video which is gigantic in size, approaching or exceeding gigabytes for a typical 2 hour movie. Yet, we can't spare the extra space or bandwidth for a higher quality audio file which is still a fraction of the size? I don't get it.

That video isn't lossless either. The mostly-indistinguishable-from-lossless point has already been reached for downloadable audio, whereas video is still creeping up on it.

Yes,I know this, but the size of the video files are much greater than the music files. I hear people complaining about the sizes of lossless music files, but not about 1080p video files. In fact, I have read comments from people complaining about only having 720p available from iTunes because of their 1080p televisions. However, these files are measured better in terms of gigabytes instead of megabytes. In other words, lossless music files shouldn't be problem, especially so with the cost of storage and bandwidth available. They are not that large when you compare them to even compressed video files (that are 720p or even 1080p).

Re: Apple Lossless Audio Codec is now open source (Apache license)

#124

Post by ugh »

splicer wrote: post #29
ethank wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lossless music - there is an audience for it, and it creates the ability to stratify prices, which the labels/rights-holders/distributors like. See the vinyl boom, hdtracks.com, http://www.becausesoundmatters.com/ , etc. So will Apple cater to audiophiles? No. Will they cater to margins? For damned sure they will if it serves them and those they entice to sign over content. Why would they switch to 1080P otherwise? A…

I only buy lossless music. I usually end up buying WAV/AIFF/FLAC direct from the artist, from their record label, or from Beatport. Once in a while, if I can't find something, I'll buy it on CD. Earlier today, I actually bought vinyl because I couldn't find a lossless digital version of this track anywhere: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwsUfEvmKwI Lossy formats are useless to me since I can't remix them without it…

I'm fairly certain that devices in twenty or fifty years will still be able to play MP3. It's too pervasive and supporting it is too easy for it to disappear just like that. It might not be supported in hardware (like it is today in many devices to save battery life) but there will be plenty of software.

You tend to not be able to use formats because hardly anyone used them in the past. MP3 is too popular for that to happen. (As is JPEG, PDF and probably AAC.)

Re: Apple Lossless Audio Codec is now open source (Apache license)

#125

Post by kennystone »

BitMastro wrote: post #103
angus77 wrote: post #39

Is there an advantage to this for someone who owns no Apple products and has no iTunes account? EDIT: Looking at http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Lossless_compa... it looks like the only clear advantage ALAC has is iTunes/iDevice support. FLAC has faster encoding/decoding speeds, and it's unknown if ALAC has error handling (which FLAC has). FLAC also supports RIFF chunks, has pipe support and is ReplayGa…

Unfortunately I'm getting more and more biased against Apple these days, but then why they didn't use FLAC from the beginning? The FLAC format was stable from 2001 and Apple introduced ALAC in 2004, was it just as a way to be able to use DRM?

Apple needed DRM at the beginning to get label deals. Now they don't.

Re: Apple Lossless Audio Codec is now open source (Apache license)

#126

Post by Duff »

aw3c2 wrote: post #96
mitjak wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet the most major popular MP3 player on the market can't play FLAC, which will probably mean it will remain as obscure as it is now (i.e., mostly used among audiophiles).

Predicting the future based on current popularity is utterly useless. Just think of the Internet Explorer.

Yes, think of internet explorer.

A decade later, many developers are still supporting IE6's peculiar dialect of HTML. And a few are still supporting IE5's even more peculiar dialect.

Re: Apple Lossless Audio Codec is now open source (Apache license)

#127

Post by Duff »

ralfd wrote: post #112
jhuni wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that Apple's business model is based upon selling artificially scarce content (music, applications, etc) over closed and restrictive platforms. A couple of open products isn't going to change their fundamental business model. The argument that "Apple is just a business" doesn't hold weight for me either because there are clearly superior business models out their like Google's which is based upon free…

No, look at the quarter results of Apple. Their revenue is selling hardware stuff. Digital content is relatively a small amount. I also find "artificially scarce" a very biased description. The App Store has an unbelievable positive impact on the developer ecosystem. And if books/gamecartridges/printed newspaper are replaced by digital stuff we shouldn't deride payment for that. Look at ebooks or Amazon kindle. These…

I think of Apple as akin to a warehouse club like Costco or Sam's.

These "clubs" sell a high margin membership, and you get to buy low-margin toilet paper 50 rolls at a time.

Likewise, Apple sells digital media, which is a relatively low-margin business. But by doing so, they get you to buy high-margin hardware and services.

Re: Apple Lossless Audio Codec is now open source (Apache license)

#128

Post by astrange »

kinetik wrote: post #76
stock_toaster wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the apache 2.0 license [1] includes a grant. 3. Grant of Patent License. Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this section) patent license to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer the Work, where such license applies only t…

So, the next question is: is the container format (MPEG-4 Part 14) patent encumbered?

There is no active patent pool for MPEG-4 systems.

Re: Apple Lossless Audio Codec is now open source (Apache license)

#129

Post by Samuel_Michon »

tripzilch wrote: post #121
sjwright wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This stuff is delicately mastered in the studio And football is the sport of delicately manoeuvring your opponent onto the grass. And heroin is a drug that delicately shifts your brain chemistry. And a chainsaw delicately tickles tree trunks.

Ok so you don't like electronic dance/club music. We get it. I gotta say, I disagree with the guy below me being downvoted, because when I read this "troll" was the first thing that sprang to my mind as well. I don't disagree with you on the matter that you can't tell the difference between quality lossy and lossless recordings, btw. As long as they're the end-product and not being used for further processing. Which…

"Ok so you don't like electronic dance/club music. We get it."

I think what he meant was that the act of mastering popular music often isn't exactly a subtle process. During mastering they try to make the music as loud as possible, reducing dynamic range in the process.

"With the advent of the Compact Disc (CD), music is encoded to a digital format with a clearly defined maximum peak amplitude. Once the maximum amplitude of a CD is reached, loudness can be increased still further through signal processing techniques such as dynamic range compression and equalization. Engineers can apply an increasingly high ratio of compression to a recording until it more frequently peaks at the maximum amplitude. Extreme uses of dynamic range compression can introduce clipping and other audible distortion. Modern albums that use such extreme dynamic range compression therefore sacrifice sound quality to loudness. The competitive escalation of loudness has led music fans and members of the musical press to refer to the affected albums as "victims of the loudness war"."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

Re: Apple Lossless Audio Codec is now open source (Apache license)

#130

Post by throwawayday »

dereg wrote: post #114
jhuni wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that Apple's business model is based upon selling artificially scarce content (music, applications, etc) over closed and restrictive platforms. A couple of open products isn't going to change their fundamental business model. The argument that "Apple is just a business" doesn't hold weight for me either because there are clearly superior business models out their like Google's which is based upon free…

I'm tired of the term "artificial scarcity". First, do you understand what scarcity means? The supply of content is unlimited. Putting a price on content is not creating "scarcity". Consumers make content purchasing decisions based on the scarcity of their own resources. Second, what is non-artificial scarcity? All scarcity is artificial.

I think the term is being used to note that the price is artificially high - supply is virtually limitless once the first copy of the song is created, so the price should approach zero.
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