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

Post by jsz0 » Fri, Oct 28, 2011, 3:13 AM UTC

savoytruffle wrote: post #35

ugh wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MP3 was great for its time. It’s not a crap format, there are merely better formats available today. They weren’t when MP3 came to the market. (Specifically AAC was developed as a successor to MP3.) I’m also not sure whether this tells you anything. Apple started selling AAC encoded music at a time when no† music player could play it. Many mistakenly thought that AAC was some sort of proprietary Apple codec and it mi…

ALAC is used in AirPlay streaming (it was first announced along with the AirPort Express in mid 2004). This might be a plan to make AirPlay audio streaming more ubiquitous.

Post by klodolph » Fri, Oct 28, 2011, 3:45 AM UTC

pork wrote: post #12

ethank wrote: post #9

This is fantastic. Apple uses AAC partly because of the patent royalty ( http://mp3licensing.com/ ) which they have to pay on every iPad/pod/etc sold, as well as because it is just a better format. MP3 is a total racket held by Thompson Technicolor, on top of being a pretty crap format. Hopefully this is a portends Apple offering lossless through ITMS on top of the 1080p rights they are hunting down right now.

MP3 may be a crap format, but it's the VHS of the digital world.

Post by nitrogen » Fri, Oct 28, 2011, 4:05 AM UTC

metajack wrote: post #44

psychotik wrote: post #21

I hope Google adds (hardware) support for this to Android - it would add another option for patent un-encumbered audio formats, outside of Vorbis.

FLAC has been around longer and is also part of the Xiph.org project along with Vorbis. If Google wanted to add a lossless codec, they certainly could have before now. (Disclaimer: I am associated with Xiph.org.)

Post by nitrogen » Fri, Oct 28, 2011, 4:07 AM UTC

jsz0 wrote: post #23

gtrak wrote: post #2

What's the point of this over flac?

I'm not familiar with the current state of FLAC but as of a few years ago ALAC offered better meta-data in the MP4 container. Part of the reason I abandoned FLAC years ago was constant problems with meta-data. I would often end up corrupt files post-tagging or the player would simply not show meta-data I had meticulously added to my bootleg collection. I got the sense at the time that there was a lack of agreement on…

  uriel 2 hours ago | link [dead]

  Afaik FLAC this days uses an ogg container, which is where
  the metadata goes, so support should be as good as for Ogg
  Vorbis.

  In practical terms, I have a huge collection of FLAC, and
  never had trouble with metadata, sounds like a bug in
  whatever player you were using.

Post by sitkack » Fri, Oct 28, 2011, 4:16 AM UTC

wefqwef123 wrote: post #28

andfarm wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It plays on iPods and other iOS devices. Other than that, not much -- FLAC's compression ratio is a bit better on average, and more non-Apple devices support it. The release of this code isn't really all that exciting, as there's already a free reverse-engineered implementation in libav. (It might not support all the modes described in this source release, though.)

he means ffmpeg