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Apple Lossless Audio Codec is now open source (Apache license)
- gtrak 15y agoWhat's the point of this over flac?
- jpeterson 15y agoiTunes does not support FLAC.
- willidiots 15y agoiDevices don't support FLAC, IIRC.
- mortenjorck 15y agoIt allows you to play lossless audio on the combined 400 million(1) iPods and iOS devices out there. (1)http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/04/apple-lawsuit-reveals-60-million-ipod-touches-sold-to-date.ars http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/04/apple-lawsuit-reve...
- juliano_q 15y agoWell, FLAC already can be played in the millions of Android phones out there. I don't see the point in having two different formats, it will just make worse for the consumer who want to change from one platform to another. I bought a lot of FLAC music and it is a shame that I can only listen it on my Android phone and not on my iPod.
- icefox 15y agoBeen hunting around, but does anyone know the first ipod to support it?
- andfarm 15y agoIt 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.)
- wefqwef123 15y agohe means ffmpeg
- sitkack 15y agoffmpeg renamed themselves to libav
- tjpick 15y agoconsumer products that actually support it?
- Andys 15y agoAndroid market has had at least one FLAC player for at least 2 years now
- artsrc 15y agoI have had something like this for 3 years: http://www.logitech.com/en-au/speakers-audio/wireless-music-systems/devices/5745 http://www.logitech.com/en-au/speakers-audio/wireless-music-...
- BitMastro 15y agoFLAC has been supported by Rockbox http://www.rockbox.org/ http://www.rockbox.org/ since 2005.. I remember using it in my iriver H300, iPods were supported as well
- tjpick 15y agowell yeah, decoders exist. Rockbox doesn't qualify as a "consumer product" in the sense I was using the term. IE, walk into my local electronics store and pick up a device and take it to the till. Good point (to the other poster) about the squeezebox though, quite correct.
- msbarnett 15y agoDedicated playback hardware on iOS devices.
- jsz0 15y agoI'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 how meta-data was supposed to work in FLAC files.
- uriel 15y agoAfaik 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.
- nitrogen 15y agoNote to uriel: your last few posts are all [dead] for some reason. 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.
- Freaky 15y agoThe Ogg container is optional, and I can't say I've seen it used much, if ever - I gather its main use was for streaming. FLAC has its own metadata as part of the spec: http://flac.sourceforge.net/format.html#metadata_block http://flac.sourceforge.net/format.html#metadata_block
- mikeash 15y agoIn addition to iOS playback as mentioned by other posters, ALAC is also used when streaming AirPlay audio. I would have killed for this code a few years ago.
- tiles 15y agoFor those unfamiliar with the site, MacOSForge is an official Apple site which hosts repositories for code included in OS X (see http://www.opensource.apple.com/ http://www.opensource.apple.com/ and the sidebar) The announcement with timestamp for today is on the homepage: http://www.macosforge.org/ http://www.macosforge.org/
- kahawe 15y agoI don't know why Apple has gotten THAT much flak for allegedly being totally closed and locking you down worse than Microsoft did back in the dark ages etc. Yes, they have certain core products which are their own and they don't open them up and the locking down of their iPhones, well, it could be a blessing and a curse. I will only say that from the perspective of a regular customer, the quality control done on apps is probably not such a bad thing but yes, for app developers it probably just sucks. And the music you buy online on iTunes now comes pretty much without any DRM in high quality AAC. 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.
- jhuni 15y agoThe problem is that Apple's business model is based upon selling artificially scarce content (music, applications, etc) over closed and restrictive platforms. A couple of open products isn't going to change their fundamental business model. 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).
- kahawe 15y agoI still have quite a few other options to buy my music online or just buy music the old fashioned way; same goes for shows and movies. I do not see anything "scarce" here at all. And I can play music in pretty much all popular formats I got from elsewhere on iTunes and iPod just fine. And now the music from the iTunes store is not DRM locked-down anymore either. And you are comparing apples and oranges with Google here. Apple is selling hardware and now all sorts of media and software along with it. Google has a completely different business model. And what benefit do I as a customer directly gain from google using Linux as a foundation? As long as their servers work, I am pretty much unaffected by the platform. Apple is using BSD as a foundation in OS X, so? And there are open source components available. Does google give me the source code for their web search or gmail or ads or all their other core products? What makes google a "clearly superior business model"? Just because Linux is "cool"? Last time I checked, Apple is doing pretty well and has been consistently so over the last years so I doubt their business model needs to be replaced. I am glad Apple is getting more popular because finally there is some real actual competition in the consumer sector. And for each of their products, there are just as excellent alternatives available so I am not being forced or locked down on anything. I can take my contacts, pictures, videos and music with me, it is pretty much all available or exportable in(to) standardized formats.
- ethank 15y agoThis is fantastic. Apple uses AAC partly because of the patent royalty (http://mp3licensing.com/ 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.
- pork 15y agoMP3 may be a crap format, but it's the VHS of the digital world.
- klodolph 15y agoIt's the DVD of the audio world, ten years from now. It's supported everywhere. The quality is good enough, but we have better.
- DarkShikari 15y agoThis is fantastic. Apple did AAC because of the patent royalty (http://mp3licensing.com/ http://mp3licensing.com/) which they have to pay on every iPad/pod/etc sold 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.
- ethank 15y agoSorry: USE aac. 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).
- necubi 15y agoThere's no mention of a patent grant. Does anybody know the state of ALAC with regards to patents?
- stock_toaster 15y agoI believe the apache 2.0 license [1] includes a grant. 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://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
- jolan 15y agoSomeone came up with a reverse engineered decoder 6+ years ago: http://craz.net/programs/itunes/alac.html http://craz.net/programs/itunes/alac.html Nice to have an encoder now too.
- daeken 15y agoI worked on this with craz, taking directly "decompiled" code into a useful form. This was by far one of the most interesting things I've ever done -- if you want to get into reversing or increase your skills, do a codec! I built a stupid simple reference encoder in Python right after, but never managed to really get it right; wonder if I still have all the old code around.
- sneak 15y agoffmpeg has had both encode and decode support for alac for some time.
- lyime 15y agoThis is amazing. Since running Mugasha for the past few years, encoding in AAC has been a huge hassle. Lib faac has terrible encoding quality compared to good ones like Nero and Apple.
- psychotik 15y agoI hope Google adds (hardware) support for this to Android - it would add another option for patent un-encumbered audio formats, outside of Vorbis.
- metajack 15y agoFLAC 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.)
- nitrogen 15y agoIt looks like it's been done, as of Honeycomb for tablets and Ice Cream Sandwich for phones: https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=1461 https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=1461
- vetinari 15y agoIt may or may not be done. Samsung products tend to support codecs that vanilla Android does not support. As of 2.3.7 (latest published source), it is not in the source tree.
- nitrogen 15y agoThe link I posted is for a Google issue that was marked as Released. Hopefully we'll see it in there when the ICS source code is released.
- sunsu 15y agoWould be great if android implemented encoding to that format now. Its a pain to try to get the same audio formats from both Android and iOS devices because both platforms encode to completely different formats.
- frou_dh 15y agoI've got all my CDs ripped in ALAC so that I can use the iTunes option to have the tracks automatically transcoded to smaller, lossy AAC when putting them on iDevices. I welcome this open sourcing because it makes my 'archival' format slightly less oddball.
- sitkack 15y agoffmpeg already can transcode from alac to flac, I rip with itunes and transcode to flac for my Sansa Clip.
- splicer 15y agoFINALLY!!! But what does this mean for the future of FLAC?
- lclarkmichalek 15y agoNothing much? People with lossless collections in FLAC are likely to continue building them in FLAC. And if they switch over to AAC, then there is no loss. With free lossless audio codecs, everyone wins.
- Samuel_Michon 15y agoALAC ≠ AAC ALAC : AAC : : FLAC : MP3
- wollw 15y agoYour point that ALAC != AAC is true and all but a better comparison would probably be ALAC : AAC :: FLAC : Ogg Vorbis
- Samuel_Michon 15y agoAgreed.
- metajack 15y agoThe Xiph.org project has always maintained that if there are royalty free audio codecs available for everyone, then we've won. We never cared that they were ours, but no one else seemed to be building them. 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.
- splicer 15y agoAnyone know the URL for the repo? It looks like they're using Subversion, but I don't see any svn:// links anywhere.
- dmaz 15y agohttp://svn.macosforge.org/repository/alac/trunk http://svn.macosforge.org/repository/alac/trunk
- codys 15y agoI see a trac browser for SVN, but i see no SVN link. Any idea what that may be or what an easy way to determine it is?
- angus77 15y agoIs 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_comparison#Apple_Lossless_Audio_Codec_.28ALAC.29 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.
- mitjak 15y agoAnd yet the most major popular MP3 player on the market can't play FLAC, which will probably mean it will remain as obscure as it is now (i.e., mostly used among audiophiles).
- tomjen3 15y agoNot really. Flac is lossles, and based on what the grandparent said a better format. So, store your music in flac and convert as needed.
- cageface 15y agoThat'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.
- nickloewen 15y ago> would have been far better if they'd just thrown their weight behind FLAC 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.
- b3b0p 15y agoWhat I don't get is why don't places like iTunes and Amazon offer Lossless options for downloading? I mean, here they are bragging about 720p, 1080p, high definition video which is gigantic in size, approaching or exceeding gigabytes for a typical 2 hour movie. Yet, we can't spare the extra space or bandwidth for a higher quality audio file which is still a fraction of the size? I don't get it.
- southpolesteve 15y agoCheck out www.murfie.com They do downloads and offer ALAC and FLAC
- frou_dh 15y agoThat video isn't lossless either. The mostly-indistinguishable-from-lossless point has already been reached for downloadable audio, whereas video is still creeping up on it.
- jfb 15y agoNot even remotely. H.264 is wondrous, but it can't compete with even ProRes. If we all had gigabit pipes, Apple would be selling/renting the latter over the former, believe you me. 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.
- b3b0p 15y agoYes,I know this, but the size of the video files are much greater than the music files. I hear people complaining about the sizes of lossless music files, but not about 1080p video files. In fact, I have read comments from people complaining about only having 720p available from iTunes because of their 1080p televisions. However, these files are measured better in terms of gigabytes instead of megabytes. In other words, lossless music files shouldn't be problem, especially so with the cost of storage and bandwidth available. They are not that large when you compare them to even compressed video files (that are 720p or even 1080p).
- renownedmedia 15y agoAwesome! Now embedded devices like my car will be able to play more than just MP3's!
- splicer 15y agoI just tried building libalac.a on Linux using GCC 4.6.1 and it worked! There were quite a few warnings though. To eliminate the warnings, edit /trunk/codec/makefile and add -Wno-multichar to CFLAGS.
- BuddhaSource 15y agoA successor to MP3. 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.
- chrishenn 15y agoIt doesn't make sense to use ALAC on mobile players. It's lossless so the file size is huge — you can't tell the difference between an ALAC file and whatever is sold in the iTunes store on a mobile device. Especially when the storage space is so little.
- rsynnott 15y agoNo, AAC was a successor to MP3, about a decade ago. This is a lossless format, so not really suitable for the same roles.
- joe_the_user 15y agoOpen source, sure. But patent free? Comment here indicates no: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3166268 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3166268 If AAC costs $1/device to implement, who exactly cares that the code is "opened"?
- ootachi 15y agoTwo mistakes here: (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.
- sandGorgon 15y agodoes this mean that FLAC will soon be irrelevant ? 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 ?
- altrego99 15y agoIrrelevant is a strong word, and I very much doubt it. The only reason for making this open source was for devices to be able to support this more. However FLAC has been open source for quite a while - consequently most device makers willing to make the effort to support loss-less audio codec already did so with FLAC. Support for ALAC will mostly come for these devices. Conversely, I see no reason for any device to support ALAC and not FLAC. 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.
- sandGorgon 15y agoConversely, I see no reason for any device to support ALAC and not FLAC. 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.htm http://www.tensilica.com/products/audio/audio-codecs/flac.ht... or http://www.tensilica.com/products/audio/audio-codecs.htm http://www.tensilica.com/products/audio/audio-codecs.htm (no ALAC) [2] http://www.dbpoweramp.com/dmc.htm http://www.dbpoweramp.com/dmc.htm
- sambeau 15y agoI suspect that the big news here might be Airplay. 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.
- parasitius 15y agoAll this talk about the world's top music player not supporting ... kind of blows my mind. I mean, after all, Steve Jobs did make the decision that the iOS platform would not allow 3rd party apps, right? ^_' Do you'all SERIOUSLY use your iPhones with this crappy annoying built-in player that blocks you from adding any new songs if you are traveling and didn't throw your desktop in the trunk? (Let's say you just have your netbook)??? I use Capriccio. Flick of a switch and any new stuff I bought on the netbook can be ftped into the phone over the lan (or httpd). . . Mostly FLAC but occasionally some new Mp3's from emusic.com.
- losethos 15y agoI wanted a raw sound format for LoseThos that could be imported into movie maker. The .SND format is raw, uncompressed. It's trivial. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Au_file_format http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Au_file_format It's big endian. The CIA or somebody limited it to 8000Hz. They do shit like that.