141–150 of 182 posts
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ffmpeg renamed themselves to libav
No they didn't. FFmpeg still exists. It is still active with plenty of contributions.
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Apple needed DRM at the beginning to get label deals. Now they don't.
DRM was never a consideration for ALAC since Apple never sold tracks in ALAC. My understanding was that Apple developed ALAC instread of using FLAC because they were concerned about possible patent problems with FLAC.
Other theories included better PPC support, and better designed to be decoded in low power hardware like the Airport Express.
To be honest some combination of NIH syndrome and residual squeamishness about using open source code seems far more likely.
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?
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> No, but Google also doesn't attempt to install their search service on your computer But for using any of their services they are infamous for tracking you everywhere they can, scanning your emails and for analyzing ALL data they can get on you and they are one of the companies that are very high up on the radar of privacy advocates all over the world. It is absolutely ridiculous that you are making Google up to be…
Google up to be some sort of shining example of doing good and doing the right thing(tm) given all their history so far. Given all Apple and Google is doing, they are just the same. They are companies trying to make money. To be honest, there are things I dislike about all corporations, but at least Google's main goal is deliver intelligent services like search and machine translation rather then dominate my computer…
And how is Apple dominating my computer? I have no clue what you mean.
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> No, but Google also doesn't attempt to install their search service on your computer But for using any of their services they are infamous for tracking you everywhere they can, scanning your emails and for analyzing ALL data they can get on you and they are one of the companies that are very high up on the radar of privacy advocates all over the world. It is absolutely ridiculous that you are making Google up to be…
Google up to be some sort of shining example of doing good and doing the right thing(tm) given all their history so far. Given all Apple and Google is doing, they are just the same. They are companies trying to make money. To be honest, there are things I dislike about all corporations, but at least Google's main goal is deliver intelligent services like search and machine translation rather then dominate my computer…
And at last Apple's goal is to deliver easily usable, reliable and sexy hardware and software and they are forerunners in quite a few markets they created on their own. See, that marketing-babble works even for Microsoft and Oracle too.
Google's goal is to get as much diverse data from you as possible and legal. Stop cutting a multi-billion dollar multi-national mega-corp all that slack all the time - especially considering how much flak they were and are getting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Google
And on top of that they were pretty much the only search engine for the web for a long time, so much so that "google" has become synonymous with internet for the average user. At least now there is a bit of competition from wolfram and microsoft and DDG is trying real hard. But google is clearly dominating this market and also the online ads business. Apple can only dream of coming close to this amount of market penetration.
> No I haven't because I made it clear that first and foremost I want _personal control_ over my own computer. I don't see why you don't understand this principle.
Because control of your computer includes control over your data. And you were saying you can allegedly NOT use any proprietary systems because of your work but then it is ok to use completely proprietary services way out of your control? Well look at that, actually it is just your own personal preferences which makes more sense since if you were really legally required, you couldn't use google or any other cloud services.
> Getting the tyrants at Apple
Again, you are mis-using words. Tyranny means they are alone and have all the control and are enforcing it brutally... this is complete, utter bullshit. There are lots of alternatives and on top of that, all this DRM and control for the music was a requirement from the RIAA. They did not understand this new way of selling music online and wanted as much control as possible. And since Apple made that compromise, they were the first ones to provide a legal and usable way of selling music online. And by doing this, they have shown how successful this way of distributing is thus finally they were allowed to drop the DRM. Do you really think Apple cares about controlling whether you distribute your music to 2 or 5 end systems? Then you are even more naive than I have thought.
> It is pretty convenient for them to use (steal?) source code from BSD
Waaaaaait a minute, back up. Drop the fundamentalist brain-wash bullshit-talk. BSD has always been released under the BSD license and there are many, many, MANY implementations and re-uses of their code, both open and closed, private, educational and commercial and not a single one has been "stolen".
It is perfectly legal and encouraged to use the code any way you want and why should Apple go with other sources that ultimately force them to do things hardly any company does with profitable products? Anyone who ever contributed to BSD licensed software is aware of this and it has worked perfectly fine for decades. Nothing was stolen here. It is perfectly alright for a company to choose whichever software and license agreement they see fit. And there is hardly any commercial software released under the "viral" FSF licenses. And Apple has released a lot of components from their OS, again under a BSD style license. Nothing to see here.
> it won't be "good enough" until they adopt a business model that is not based upon dominating other people's computers.
See, here is the point: that is your borderline-religious opinion. Nobody really cares about this. if you don't like their product because it is not as open as you like then don't buy it. And if you don't like the price on a Lexus or Ferrari then don't buy one. Nothing to see here.
You have clearly made up your mind and are not interested in a discussion. You much rather poo-fling the one or two (out-dated) bits you can get a hold of. And it has got nothing to do with how the overwhelming majority of successful software and hardware companies work. Some are very open, some are completely closed. Luckily there are a lot of alternatives for everything. But your zealot-hatred for Apple is just hilarious considering how 5 to 10 years ago hardly ANYONE knew Apple let alone used any of their products and back in those dark ages there was nothing but Microsoft for the average end user. Apple has come a long way on their own and they have single-handedly created markets that did NOT exist before - like legally buying music and tv shows online. Like the iPad and like the iPhone. Yes there were those ridiculous windows ce "smartphones" before but Apple created the market for the modern smartphone and the oh-so-beloved "apps". And google was all too happy to follow, seeing the opportunity for more data and ads.
Any data I feed my mac, I can always export and take with me to any other platform... there is absolutely no DRM on my Mac keeping me from doing whatever I want.
Your demeanor is really cute and very much like the blind fanboys in the huge Linux vs. Windows flamewars back in the day... the 90s called, they want their zealots back.
And I dare you, you show me a single contribution you have ever made to Linux? Or free software? You show me a single instance where you actually looked at all that free software kernel code and helped make sure there wasn't anything fishy going on. Or are you just talking big about free software without ever having contributed hm?
This is pointless here since you make your own product choice and your own personal preferences to be something like a categorical imperative that you want to force on everyone despite the normative power of the factual.
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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…
The App Store has an unbelievable positive impact on the developer ecosystem. Paul Graham (the creator of this site) commented on the App Store himself, and his words were not entirely of ignorant praise like yours are: http://www.paulgraham.com/apple.html The scarce thing is really your favorite band making a kickass song, investigative journalism instead of astroturfing and GRRM writing the next ASOIAF novel in les…
And you will find just as many people who love the app store oh and 18,000,000,000+ downloads and counting should nicely prove those 2 year old prophecies wrong.
Someone came up with a reverse engineered decoder 6+ years ago: http://craz.net/programs/itunes/alac.html Nice to have an encoder now too.
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Not really. Flac is lossles, and based on what the grandparent said a better format. So, store your music in flac and convert as needed.
That's what I do. The point of lossless is to have a stable archive that can be converted into the convenient format and bitrate of the day. It's great that Apple is finally open-sourcing their codec but it would have been far better if they'd just thrown their weight behind FLAC in the first place and avoided this completely gratuitous and consumer-unfriendly fragmentation.
That would definitely be better, but the fact is that they can't (reasonably) re-write all of the previous iDevice firmwares to support FLAC, so open sourcing ALAC benefits all of the users with those devices. If open source codecs is the route Apple is going down, then perhaps they will ad support for FLAC to new versions of iOS, but for everyone not using those versions, this would still help. Throwing weight behind FLAC is good, just throwing weight behind FLAC is slightly less good. All that said, using lossless codecs on an iPod, like you said, is a bit overkill.
What I think would really be nice is if Apple would open source the music database on the iPod -- not being able to load an iPod from Linux/not iTunes (easily) is much more of an issue for me than support for a lossless codec.