Apple's Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) Now Open Source

batchtaster said:

Fixed.

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Android's market share has long surpassed that of iOS. I'd say theres little debate over which open source format will have more success.

Not that I really see any of the lossless formats taking over mp3 anytime soon, people are too comfortable with it and its still quite good (assuming you dont touch that awful piece of software called iTunes and use LAME encoding).

wikus said:

This is key. And especially appropriate how massive the market share is compared to a single device centred around the closed source iOS.

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There is more than one device running iOS. You've got iPhones, iPods, Apple TVs, etc. Plus there have been over 250 Million iOS devices sold. That's a lot to use this format.

Anyway, this is great news. Nobody could (or rather should) be unhappy about.

The nice thing is that since FLAC and ALAC are lossless, you can convert between them and lose nothing.

So if you have your music in FLAC format, it's trivial to convert to ALAC to play on your iPhone. You can even delete the FLAC files to save space, and have lost nothing.

The best utility for this is Max http://sbooth.org/Max/ which is free and open source. It can even multithread the conversion so it's quite fast on machines with lots of cores.

zorinlynx said:

The nice thing is that since FLAC and ALAC are lossless, you can convert between them and lose nothing.

So if you have your music in FLAC format, it's trivial to convert to ALAC to play on your iPhone. You can even delete the FLAC files to save space, and have lost nothing.

The best utility for this is Max http://sbooth.org/Max/ which is free and open source. It can even multithread the conversion so it's quite fast on machines with lots of cores.

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I dont know why anyone would convert to ALAC when (currently) only iTunes has ALAC support.

What SHOULD happen is apple adopts FLAC.

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arn said:

Not to start a platform argument, but Android's marketshare may be bigger than the iPhone's. But if you include all iPods (non iOS ones), iPod Touches, and iPads, that market size is certainly still bigger than Android. In terms of devices which support ALAC.

arn

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I wouldnt bet on that assumption. Thats basically saying there are no other platforms outside of ipods and ipads. I still have a sony mp3 player from 2006. Granted it doesnt have lossless support, its still a device that contributes to the market share.

Apple's numbers are artificially inflated.

wikus said:

I dont know why anyone would convert to ALAC when (currently) only iTunes has ALAC support.

What SHOULD happen is apple adopts FLAC.

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You mean one of the most popular media players support ALAC and you don't know why anyone would convert to it?

I convert all my CD's to ALAC and also anything I download as FLAC is converted to ALAC as well. I wouldn't mind using FLAC but iTunes doesn't support it so, ALAC's the way to go.

Also, now that ALAC is open source, you'll see many other players offering support for it as well. If they don't, they'll be in the same position Apple was for not supporting FLAC.

StoneyG said:

In my experience the bit rate of Apple Lossless ranges from about 790-1050 kbps (but generally closer to 1000 kbps... my computer's not in front of me right now). Half of AIFF/WAV/LPCM/yougettheidea would be a stretch.

It would be nice if they smartened up and offered lossless on their store (at least as an option). There are a few albums I'd even pay double for a 24 bit, 48 KHz version of (or 96). Yes, most people don't have the ears or equipment to sort of surpass the current level of "audio transparency", but some of us do.

In terms of audio fidelity, the Compact Disc was a step backwards from vinyl. ~20 years later, 128/256 kbps AAC through the iTunes store once again was a step back. We have phones and such that are absolutely unreal nowadays, so why should audio reproduction be such an afterthought?

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Bc then ppl would have to get real headphones and discard the awesome and trendy white earbuds! Also bandwidth. I gave my friend a disc I had in V0 to replace his crappy version and he could tell a noticeable difference on a Dell Inpsiron laptop through the stock speakers. I was like wow, my ears probably would've bled with his other version through my Ultrasone Pro 900s. I really wish audio wasn't such an afterthought, but then brands like Beats by Dre wouldn't be able to sell $300 headphones that sell purely on name and looks and not audio reproduction quality per dollar spent.

I know your progression is accurate, but honestly for almost every human even with pretty good quality components, formats like V0 or 256 AAC (which from the iTunes store is actually VBR and better than a 256 CBR rip) are sufficient. Anything less is really a step in the wrong direction. But I just couldn't have anywhere near the music I do if I had 24bit/96khz songs on a portable device. I have a few 24/96 vinyl rips and while they sound good, they're not noticeably better than a 16/44 ALAC rip, and only slightly better than a V0 or 320 rip. I don't understand why anyone thought 128 was acceptable in any circumstance, however.

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zorinlynx said:

The nice thing is that since FLAC and ALAC are lossless, you can convert between them and lose nothing.

So if you have your music in FLAC format, it's trivial to convert to ALAC to play on your iPhone. You can even delete the FLAC files to save space, and have lost nothing.

The best utility for this is Max http://sbooth.org/Max/ which is free and open source. It can even multithread the conversion so it's quite fast on machines with lots of cores.

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If you have a Mac, I love XLD for all things converting and ripping.

TigerWoodsIV said:

If you have a Mac, I love XLD for all things converting and ripping.

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And if only there was an app for cue splitting, XLD fails big time on that.

wikus said:

I wouldnt bet on that assumption. Thats basically saying there are no other platforms outside of ipods and ipads. I still have a sony mp3 player from 2006. Granted it doesnt have lossless support, its still a device that contributes to the market share.

Apple's numbers are artificially inflated.

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Artificially inflated by factual sales numbers? Android is a phone platform that hasn't been around very long compared to say the iPod that's been around for 10 years. Between all iOS devices and iPods that aren't on iOS there's hundreds of millions. I don't believe I know anyone that listens to their music on something other than an Apple device unless they have a BB or Droid to listen to music through their phone occasionally.

I always encoded my music with AIFF since day one. The quality is great. Never tried ALAC, however.

iBug2 said:

And if only there was an app for cue splitting, XLD fails big time on that.

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News to me. I've used XLD for cue splitting plenty of times before and it has worked perfectly.

Discoverer said:

I always encoded my music with AIFF since day one. The quality is great. Never tried ALAC, however.

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ALAC is the same quality, you just save on file size.

arn said:

Sure, of course, some compression is possible without data loss. ALAC files are roughly 50% of uncompressed.

.zip is lossless. If it wasn't all your programs would break after going through compression/decompression.

Think of this: AAAAAAAA compresses to 8A which can be uncompressed to AAAAAAAA without any data loss.

arn

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Well that's exactly how zip works; isn't it?

wikus said:

Android's market share has long surpassed that of iOS. I'd say theres little debate over which open source format will have more success.

Not that I really see any of the lossless formats taking over mp3 anytime soon, people are too comfortable with it and its still quite good (assuming you dont touch that awful piece of software called iTunes and use LAME encoding).

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What does this have to do with Android?
This is an audio compression format.... That can now be used on anything.

killmoms said:

News to me. I've used XLD for cue splitting plenty of times before and it has worked perfectly.

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I've also used it many times to success and many other times I've found out that it didn't work. Just depends on the instance, which obviously isn't good enough.

Hilarious

schlitzz said:

Aflac !!!!!!

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Wife: What's so funny?

Me: (Do I try to explain this?)

TigerWoodsIV said:

That'd be nice, but don't see it happening. Just so much bandwidth for people downloading the files from the cloud. Interested to see if this means anything that would affect me. I don't use ALAC anymore because I'm running out of space on my classic so I encoded all my ALAC to 320 AAC, so can't imagine it really will.

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Cathode said:

No way. The filesizes of many lossless files are huge.

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Seems like this would severely hinder the adoption of it if Apple wants it for the masses. Though they simply could care less about the masses and might want to be moving towards a standard that at least plays nice with their devices.

Does this mean Google Music will finally be able to upload my songs purchased from iTunes?

Yes!

ALAC on iTunes? That will happen when there is a massive boost on average download speed for the world. For most people, that would be a lot of bandwidth. Not to mention, ISPs need to cheapen up plans or make unlimited more viable for this kind of thing. Last but not least, storage space overall would need to be massive to store a lot of songs. So I don't see it happening

I wonder if the pirates will use ALAC instead of FLAC now.

wikus said:

Android's market share has long surpassed that of iOS. I'd say theres little debate over which open source format will have more success.

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NOPE. Here's the real market share:

iOS > Android
Android phones > iPhone

The problem is that most Android phones are being used as feature phones, not smart phones, so
iPhone used as smartphone > Android used as smartphone

While this is good news I still wish my iPod supported FLAC, Ogg and other open formats too.

iTunes doesn't need lossless as standard, it should just have it as an option. I buy CDs to get a lossless rip, not so I have a shiny case and disc.

everything would've been simpler had Apple adopted FLAC in the first place, but now that ALAC is open source, I don't think it matters. ALAC should get wider compatibility since it's freely available now. in any case, it's only a minor annoyance to convert between FLAC and ALAC.

wikus said:

Android's market share has long surpassed that of iOS. I'd say theres little debate over which open source format will have more success.

Not that I really see any of the lossless formats taking over mp3 anytime soon, people are too comfortable with it and its still quite good (assuming you dont touch that awful piece of software called iTunes and use LAME encoding).

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MP3s are not "still quite good". LAME encoding has improved, but it still sucks compared to lossless.

Android may have more market share, but it's the same as PCs; Windows has more market share, but Apple has the best-selling laptop & desktop. Apple is a hardware-centric company that happens to produce exclusive, fantastic software optimized for the hardware.
The iPhone has more users than any other Android phone. More people buy a MacBook Pro 15" than people buy e.g. a Dell XPS 15z. But there's so many of these single models which Apple products easily beat that, cumulatively, Apple's competition has more users than Apple.


Awesome news! Kudos to Apple!

ParisParamus said:

Can someone explain what "half as much" means? I though the ALAC didn't create fidelity loss. Or is some compression possible without such?

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Yes. It is possible to create a file of noise which ALAC can't reduce in size. But ALAC is designed for audio that doesn't sound like complete noise, and thus can be losslessly compressed to something smaller. Basically, if a human can hear something other than just noise, there's some amount of redundancy in the information theoretic sense. And that allows lossless compression in size.

A quick note -- one of the main reasons Apple developed ALAC was competing formats, though open source, were designed to optimize compression. This meant that many of them consumed a lot of memory and/or processor power, and by extension they used a lot of battery.

ALAC was intended as a low-power lossless codec, and at the time it was released 6 or 7 years ago, it was one of the best in that regard. Too lazy to google, but there were a number of tests that showed the ease of playing back ALAC, vs FLAC or any of its competitors.

It has long since mattered, now that most playback devices outperform the desktops from 6 or 7 years ago. But low power, high performance compression is a valuable thing that will find its way into applications -- such as increasing the bandwidth of uncompressed multichannel audio formats.