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

[adamgibbo]

The Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) is an audio codec developed by Apple and supported on iPhone, iPad, most iPods, Mac and iTunes. ALAC is a data compression method which reduces the size of audio files with no loss of information. A decoded ALAC stream is bit-for-bit identical to the original uncompressed audio file.



The Apple Lossless Audio Codec project contains the sources for the ALAC encoder and decoder. Also included is an example command line utility, called alacconvert, to read and write audio data to/from Core Audio Format (CAF) and WAVE files. A description of a 'magic cookie' for use with files based on the ISO base media file format (e.g. MP4 and M4A) is included as well.



The Apple Lossless Audio Codec sources are available under the Apache license. Details can be found here http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.

http://alac.macosforge.org/

[slothropean]

So does this mean Apple is finally going to start offering lossless for sale on the iTunes store?

[kornchild2002]

So does this mean Apple is finally going to start offering lossless for sale on the iTunes store?

I highly doubt Apple is going to start offering ALAC content in the iTunes Store mainly because they are about to turn the switch on for iTunes Match and that deals with lossy (256kbps AAC) audio only. I just don't see Apple starting one lossy service only to startup a lossless one in a short amount of time. If anything, Apple is just pushing their format beyond the constraints of their own software. Sure, third part encoders and decoders exist but now users can rely on code directly from Apple instead of using something that may not be completely solid (dBpowerAMP's early implementation of their own ALAC encoder is a prime example). Leave it up to people on the internet to either blindly stamp on everything Apple does only to chock it up to them trying to take over the world or mindlessly praising it as if everything from them is a gift. I think this walks somewhere in the middle. Yes, Apple obviously has their reasoning which will never truly get out but the positive is that the most popular portable audio player line, the most popular slate tablet, and one of the most popular smartphones out there all work with this and now others can take advantage of Apple's ALAC implementation without reverse engineering.