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 ReplayGain compatible, and has some support for embedded CUE sheets.
So, store your music in flac and convert as needed.
Shouldn't take us long to find out now.
Then you have the metadata problem — ALAC is in a normal mp4 container so everything's uniform and well-used, with FLAC you're stuck with the ogg container or its proprietary system. That wouldn't be so bad, except that almost nobody puts metadata in their FLAC files, instead preferring to bundle along separate text files with a description of the tracks and info about the rip. I think they do it so that the whole file's hash stays constant.
Better still, FLAC provides excellent command-line tools for encoding, decoding and tagging so I can script batch operations easily. I'm not aware of anything similar for ALAC. Maybe with the codec in the open these tools will emerge?
From which git repository do you clone your encoding software?
Have you used WAV files recently? I haven't read about major progress on that front either.
The announcement with timestamp for today is on the homepage: http://www.macosforge.org/
But they are not ONLY "evil" because at the same time, Apple did contribute to open standards and there is a lot of Open Source available. It is, however, still a business so for me, it seems they are playing it smart and do "open" where it also benefits them and their customers and do "closed/locked down" where it is critical for their own success or in accordance with their product philosophy or the reality distortion field.
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 software (linux) and intelligent cloud services (search).
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.
Since when did Apple "do AAC"? AAC is a standardized format that makes up part of MPEG-4, contributed to by dozens of companies and organizations. The patent licensing is handled by Via Licensing, not Apple. AAC has patent licensing fees too; over a dollar per device (albeit with a very low cap, IIRC).
, as well as because it is just a better format.
MPEG-4 AAC was the successor to MPEG-1 Layer 3 (MP3), by the same organization, so this is no surprise.
ALAC was -- for many years -- a proprietary FLAC-alike. There was no real reason to use it except for compatibility with Apple devices, as the two use nearly identical compression methods and the incompatibility is purely gratuitous.
AAC has no patent for streaming or distribution. When we did direct-to-consumer digital sales this is why I used this rather than Mp3, and ALAC for lossless over FLAC because of the support issue.
AAC does have a patent fee for codec usage (i.e., devices).
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 might as well have been.
Today more people than ever have an iOS device or an iPod. There is no need at all for Apple to play nice and make sure that others can also use the ALAC. Why should they?
Also: What’s the incentive for offering lossless music? No one† can tell the difference. Do you really think Apple will start catering to audiophiles? Because of the switch to flash memory space is limited, Apple’s current devices are not a good match for lossless music.
—
† Don’t be pedantic.
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?
Also: given device sizes it would be nice to have raw uncompressed/lossless and I could downsample at will to suit specific devices/systems.
Because others already have FLAC?
Isn't it similar to the kid offering to share his bicycle, to his neighbor, with the hope of friendship, knowing fully well that it will do no real benefit since his neighbor already has an equally good machine?
Not that it mattered at the time as they were DRMed anyway.
Since the Apache license grants a patent license, this development regarding Apple Lossless would seem to be a reversal of their previous stances. I'm glad to see it.
Edit: That said, I agree with Dark Shikari that it would have been better had Apple Lossless never existed and if they had just used FLAC instead.
That would have been a good trick, given that the very first release of Vorbis was only a year before the iPod hit the market.
I welcome this open sourcing because it makes my 'archival' format slightly less oddball.
http://craz.net/programs/itunes/alac.html
Nice to have an encoder now too.
To eliminate the warnings, edit /trunk/codec/makefile and add -Wno-multichar to CFLAGS.
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 to those patent claims licensable by such
Contributor that are necessarily infringed by their
Contribution(s) alone or by combination of their
Contribution(s) with the Work to which such Contribution(s)
was submitted. If You institute patent litigation against
any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a
lawsuit) alleging that the Work or a Contribution
incorporated within the Work constitutes direct or
contributory patent infringement, then any patent licenses
granted to You under this License for that Work shall
terminate as of the date such litigation is filed.
(1)http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/04/apple-lawsuit-reve...
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.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.
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.)
http://www.logitech.com/en-au/speakers-audio/wireless-music-...
If you put this together with the rumours of an AppleTV there could be something very special here, especially if they are pre-emtively paving the way for open-source, 3rd party developers.
Today a lot of high-fidelity audio players support FLAC as the default lossless format. This kinda meant that that iPods and these players lived in different universes as far as lossless is concerned.
If the release of this codec means that h/w manufacturers are able to incorporate this codec into their silicon (I'm not sure if the open source license extends to hardware), then effectively there is no real reason to use or support FLAC anymore (minor differences in quality nonwithstanding).
Anybody know which codec is more power efficient ?
According to Wikipedia, FLAC is more efficient in encoding/decoding speeds - with same compression ratio. This translates to it being more power efficient.
Lastly this news will matter to only a few audiophiles who are also Apple geeks.
Making something open source is a welcome gesture, but I hope Apple will do this for other items which will have better reaching consequences.
Isnt this implemented in silicon (or atleast implemented as some DSP-specific library) ? AFAIK that costs money.
Today, if you wanted a lossless player, that player had to have FLAC - which was taken from a commercial vendor like Tensilica [1]. But now that ALAC is an alternative, why would I even try to spend more money and also add FLAC ?
Plus, it is reasonably trivial to convert all FLAC to ALAC [2]
[1] http://www.tensilica.com/products/audio/audio-codecs/flac.ht... or http://www.tensilica.com/products/audio/audio-codecs.htm (no ALAC)
They do downloads and offer ALAC and FLAC
EDIT: Of course, at comparable bitrates, H.264 would likely be superior to ProRes (75-250Mb/s), but the computational complexity involved in decoding even intra-frame only H.264 versus a mezzanine format like ProRes would certainly point towards sending the latter rather than the former down the pipe, ceteris paribus.
(Disclaimer: I am associated with Xiph.org.)
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.
It's a little silly that Apple rolled their own when a perfectly good option was available, but the world still wins.
I hope they try and get it standardized. That would make it even better.
Comment here indicates no:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3166268
If AAC costs $1/device to implement, who exactly cares that the code is "opened"?
(1) Apple Lossless, not AAC. Apple is not open-sourcing their AAC decoder, which is part of QuickTime.
(2) The Apache license grants a royalty-free patent license.