Isn't FLAC coming to iTunes with Leopard already?

Isn't FLAC coming to iTunes with Leopard already?

I though much of the reason for ALAC was that they needed something that they code encode in realtime in a G4 at a low percentage of the total CPU so they could use it to stream over the air from iTunes to Airport Express? While FLAC is very computationally cheap to decode encoding is another matter.

From what I have been told, Apple went with ALAC because 1) MPEG4's ALS wasn't finished yet and 2) it would be cheaper and faster to them to create a decoder from scratch using technologies they knew were unpatented than running FLAC through several patent lawyers.

I though much of the reason for ALAC was that they needed something that they code encode in realtime in a G4 at a low percentage of the total CPU so they could use it to stream over the air from iTunes to Airport Express?

I doubt Apple would add FLAC support to the current line of iPods though, I am not sure if the older generation ones (mainly the 4G and below iPods along with the 1G mini/nano and 1G shuffles) would have the processor power to play FLAC.  It would be nice for 5G/5.5G iPod owners but I don't see Apple implementing FLAC support in the iPods until the 6G models, if they even add FLAC support to the iPods at all.

P.S. if anyone knows a better way to get apple's ear than this petition, let me know. (see also)

(roberto, who told you that?)

Given the fact that the compression ratios of lossless codecs are all
very similar and couldn't be better because of the nature of the
problem, although we care, it's not our primary focus. We tested on a
large set of music across many different types, we did not loss to
other codecs (if not win). The code is optimized for PowerPC (well, for
obvious reasons) so we won't do well against other Windows codecs
except WMA which is butt slow. Overall, it's not a great product that
we can be really proud of, but it's definitely something important to
meet the demand.

1) I think FLAC is a great codec but I'm a little lost here...Apple's support is wanted/need why? I'm not an itunes user but as a music lover I have to be happy they are finally supporting some sort of lossless codec (which can be transcoded in a pinch, no?)

3) I haven't read anything (yet?) but if Apple is going to drop formal DRM then I have to assume they are at least going to use watermarking with the customer's ID at time of purchase. I'm not sure what this entails but it could be that Apple whipped up their own lossless codec to make this easier. To the best of my knowledge no one makes a watermarker for FLAC.

about FLAC support in Leopard, I don't know what is happening either, does anyone have some evidence they can point to or is it all still rumor at this point?

anything that can play ALAC can play FLAC with more headroom given the same effort at implementation.  (by that I mean comparing a VLSI ALAC decoder that took a team 6-12 months to implement against libFLAC plugged in with a couple days work is not representative.)  I think FLAC was playing on 3G ipods running ipodlinux before there even was an ALAC.

Since iPods already play ALAC the issue would be locating FLAC decoder optimised for ARM under an appropriate license or writing one from scratch. You'd need to hand optimise some of the functions in ARMcode to get it to work I expect, although you might get away with a C implementation using the very lastest GCCs.