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Opensource Apple Lossless Decoder Released
Cody Brocious writes "David Hammerton has released version 1.0 of an ALAC decoder. This allows users of operating systems not supported by iTunes/QuickTime to listen to their Apple Lossless files, a proprietary competitor to FLAC. This is a large leap forward in audio codec interoperability, and paves the way for an ALAC encoder." The site also asks for additional help on the project.
They seem to be cracking down on their most enthusiatic community members lately.
(It's never too late to join the Renaissance)
...but I just don't see why Apple felt it was necessary to make another lossless format. While Apple in the past has been accused of often suffering from NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrome, it seemed like they were improving in this area: the iMac helped popularize USB, the open-source core of OS X has its roots in BSD, iTunes supports MP3s, their web browser gives source back to Konquerer, etc. Anyone have any theories as to why they didn't just use FLAC? After all, the work was already done for them...
Save the galaxy!
My apple lossless files...? Why would I have those if I didn't have a Mac? To me it seems more of a use to Mac users, who already have the files; it might help increase compatibility between them and 3rd party programs, for multimedia editing purposes etc.
have you ever tried to watch a quicktime file on a linux system? the best you can do for sound most of the time is lip read. this is incredible!
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
Will he get sued? Proprietary format... Apple... Lawsuits...
Also, considering that "Apple never released any documents on the format", its incredible that this guy wrote a decoder. Some people are truly amazing sometimes...
Eureka Science News - automatically updated
This initial release is version is 0.1, not 1.0
gif-like, could i use it in a real project?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
As I understand it, all the wireless Airport express streams use apple lossless codecs. How long before we can have a program to intercept these wireless music streams and then convert to mp3s or whatever you want? Pretty crappy way of getting music, slow etc the more I think about it, but why not?
WikiAfterDark.com It's a sex wiki, go now!
Just in case.
FLAC is already open source. Is ALAC better, or is it just something Apple made that will have their name on it that they can use instead of an already existing solution? From looking at the site, it doesn't seem to be even close to as good in quality or versatility.
One new iTunes feature that slipped by me was the new 'Apple Lossless Encoder'. Unlike music formats like MP3, AAC and Ogg Vorbis, lossless encoding results in no loss of quality - the music file sounds exactly like the original. The downside to this is that files compressed using lossless compression are typically quite a bit larger than their lossy counterparts. Now with this we can see great applications playing high quality audio. Thanks steve!! ---------Googel new feature: WEATHER, Read it on virtualkarma-------
fuvoo: watch something
if i compile this on Linux will MPlayer pick it up and use it? or will XMMS pick it up and use it???
Windows Media Audio 9 Lossless released as open source from MS. Maybe Apple isn't the new Microsoft after all?
Yes, but I'd find it highly doubtful that Quictime, lossy video compression extraordinaire, would uses ALAC for sound... does it?
Because Apple is the New Microsoft. They use courts to squelch free speech rights of those who would impart Apple trade secrets to the public; they legally commit restraint of trade by mixing proprietary hardware with proprietary software so competitors can't break into their non-monopoly markets with alternative products; and they don't give all their code away for free, but instead select to give away or hold secret that which maximizes profit for their shareholders. Evil bastards! *cough!* --M
I've been transcoding all the boots I download from EasyTree to ALE just because it's easier to use than FLAC or SHN with iTunes. I'm glad to see this, because it means I can start sharing stuff in this format.
But like other posters, I'm wondering how long it will be before this project gets lawyered on. Apple hasn't exactly been user friendly lately, so it seems like it's only a matter of time. Guess we'd better get it while the getting's good!
Then you really weren't paying attention to Apple before that point where all the slashdot editors bought powerbooks. Apple Legal has always* fallen on any and all leaks in their wall of silence like rabid dogs on a barbeque-sauce-covered Pre-K student. It's just that the media's never actually paid attention before this latest event, so if you're only listening to the media it seems like this is a new development.
But as far as this project goes, if they performed their reverse engineering in a proper manner they shouldn't have anything to worry about.
* At least since Spindler left. But even before that Apple Legal wasn't nice
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
We used ALAC all the time at the studio where I worked, but alas, some of our software was linux only and would not compile under OS X. This was very frustrating and required multiple computers. Finally with this system we can move over to this software as a solution. I love linux and would rather use it, but of the people I work with don't want to learn it claiming that it is more complex. Anyway, thats great that we can do the job with ALAC decoder! I'm sure other studios forced to use ALAC will be very happy with all of this.
Want to learn about anything sexual? Check out the sex wiki:
Just like a windows guy to open his mouth about something he dosnt understand. I use Linux and it works every time I need it perfectly. and about the other comment about DVD's Just use Xine I have no problems with it.
For real guys we dont flame you for using windows its your choice thats the whole idea. If you don't like Linux fine shut up about it we dont' care. We like it.
Well im going to go play BF 1942 with my rudimentary audio/video/graphics support
mplayer may not have dvd menu support, but ogle and xine are there for that... whatever, choose what you like.
Certainly never sounds like it.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
That would be both... but apparently it can't do more than 2 channel audio yet, such as 5.1 encoded audio.
I guess I haven't been paying that much attention. I suppose it was true when someone said that if Apple had the opportunity, it'd be just like Microsoft...
(It's never too late to join the Renaissance)
Good luck using Xine after the corps finally crack down on those illegal ripped and hacked win-binary codecs (real, win-media, apple's quicktime)...
Especially $$$ so that we can pay our lawyers.
If you're a gnome user you should probably check up on Planet Gnome. Here's one blog in particular that may be of interrest.
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
Really? You are sending manure over the postal system for free?
Well In that case what do I have to do to get you to send some fertilizer my way? I' really love to see tou pony up the dough for some silly trolling.
And to pay for it I say this: It really does not amaze me that you'd pay for something as unproductive as that, as you are paid to be unproductive. You are not capable of any coherent thougth so you country wisely decided to intern you in one of their large scale asylums. That you call it 'army' does not mean that it keeps you off the street. If your ranks grow too much you id10t dictator decides to star another war to get enough of you killed. Face it, you are a liability.
Now does that pay for you going to shit in a box, tape it up, go to the postoffice and pay to have send overseas? please?
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
Probably a Piquepaille friend.
He's right.
By this convenient "enthusiastic community members" phrase, the O.P. gets to take apple's recent actions against an anonymous entity who is most likely an apple employee, and abstract these actions away in the average slashdot reader's mind into this huge nefarious campaign against all that is right and good in the world.
In doing so the O.P. neatly completely and totally distracts away from the fact that as far as REAL community members go, well, Think Secret has received nothing worse than a subpeona and Mr. David Hammerton... well, actually Apple hasn't done anything to him at all.
Download & Changelog:
* 0.1.0 - March 5, 2005: Initial release. Download Now!
MD5: f554fc11ee41a30bc5baf15a0fd07256
Confusing 1.0 with 0.1.0 - way to go, editors! Would like to write more, but gone compiling new 6.11 Linux kernel.
I was just thinking this morning how nice it would be if both my iPod and my Linux boxen supported a lossless format besides uncompressed PCM, and here's the solution.
;)
Desire warping reality? Nah, if my desires warped reality I wouldn't be quite as single.
Regardless, my compliments on a superb piece of hacking. As near as I can tell the thing works perfectly, and only a few months after Apple released the format.
I assume that somebody will whip up an XMMS plugin based on the library and/or get it into Mplayer's CVS over the next week or so, but even being able to do "alac file | aplay" is a great improvement in functionality for me.
Only in a Slashdot fantasy can a Slackware install turn into several hours of sex . . . . .
The use of QuickTime does not imply ANY kind of compression, lossy or otherwise.
I use the QT lossless CODEC for my iTunes library these days, and it's good to know I might be able to decode those files outside of QT if necessary.
That was classic intercourse!
-1, offends Apple fanbois with the truth.
...they combine the two formats to get the AFLAC format. "It's the format with additional benefits!"
Would this additional help be a legal fund, by any chance? *rimshot*
When you have many embedded devices to program for, it is convenient to have control over the future of the CODEC you are using.
While FLAC is great, Apple has no controll over what direction FLAC takes.
Sigs? We don't need no stinking sigs!
The Airport Express is a router. I don't think it has an Athlon 900
You just gave me an idea. It would be pretty cool to have "The Hunter" "dialogue" generating machine. Well, cool for trolling purposes.
What's the link to the forum again? I remember reading it a while ago but never bothered to bookmark.
Stop the hate and congratulate, indeed.
I get so tired of people misunderstanding QuickTime.
QuickTime is not a codec. It's a media architecture. The MOV file format can theoretically embed arbitrary numbers of tracks (of audio, video, 3D, animated sprites, vector graphics) in any format, and QuickTime supports several dozen formats of various sorts out of the box. ALAC, like every other codec Apple implements on OS X, is just a QuickTime plugin.
Not much of the QuickTime content you find around the web uses it, though, so I don't see how this is going to help QuickTime movie playback on Linux much. But Apple is really pushing MPEG-4 these days, so if Linux has a good MPEG-4 implementation, compatibility problems should go away eventually.
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Sony freaks out on their formats because they actually have some kind of power they can gain from those formats. They have an agenda. For example they wanted to turn ATRAC or Minidisc or whatever into a distribution format, one that other people used but that they controlled. They wanted to supplant mp3 and then leverage this to pressure people into using other Sony products. They wanted to control distribution.
But ALAC isn't even intended or positioned for distribution. There's no power in it. ALACs are created in iTunes and ripped from CDs you own, and they're intended to be played back in iTunes and copied to your own personal iPod. Going through the particularly obvious or convenient interface paths in iTunes, there's no reason that once someone creates an ALAC file that ALAC would ever pass into the possession of anyone except them. Apple seems to be almost resisting the idea people could start distributing ALACs the way people distribute FLACs now. So now Apple controls... what? The way iTunes users use iTunes? They had that already, they wrote the thing.
I guess you can say ALAC locks people into iTunes since once they've ripped their collection to ALAC they can't use those ALACs in other programs but... well, no, not really, becuase ALACs are lossless-- that's what they are! So you can just tell iTunes to convert them to mp3s with no degradation or ill effects whatsoever, by simply right clicking on them. Bang, lock-in gone. And the lossy, transcoding-error-prone format Apple's pushing... is an open MPEG format, AAC. If Apple wanted power or to lock people in, they'd be pushing people to rip their iTunes libraries as some WMP-like proprietary lossy format, not pushing people to rip to AAC and then offering their proprietary ALAC as a minor option buried in the iTunes preferences.
Personally I would suspect they used ALAC rather than FLAC simply because they already had the ALAC code internally developed and their engineers were familiar with it. I doubt anywhere near as much thought went into the decision as people seem to be assuming.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Sorry bro, but "THE HUNTER" cannot be encapsulated in mere deterministic algorithms, of the type currently known to computer science. It would take a paradigm shift in computing (perhaps quantum computing) to make this possible.
As of now, "THE HUNTER" is an art form. There is a master of the art ("THE HUNTER" himself) who provides his acolytes with source material, and they attempt to learn and grow in the ways of the capslock through his guidance.
On the Mac, it's an entirely different story, with elegant integration and very clean use (small size, not much overhead, etc.).
I've been using Quicktime Pro to encode video on my own website, and, without sound, am able to pick between numerous codecs I've installed to shrink 200mb video files down to around 5mb, with no real loss in quality. It's a beautiful thing. Not to mention how quickly it handles it, without wading through tons of menus.
But when I was on Windows, it was a true PITA.
But yeah, people need to understand that .mov is no different than .avi or whatever container people felt like using at the time. The fact that so many people use it to overcompress video simply for size and bandwidth considerations shouldn't reflect poorly on the media player/container.
I'm pretty sure they say that you're not allowed to rip the codecs and use them on another operating system (at least without the license agreement).
There are only a handful of ways a proprietary format can remain proprietary:
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
When I rip to apple lossless it creates the files with the .m4a file extension which is the extension that you get when using iTunes's AAC encoder. Doesn't that mean that in order to playback ALAC files all you'd need was software that recognized that it was in actuality just a AAC file with a much higher bitrate?
QuickTime is not a codec. It's a media architecture.
However, the standard QuickTime Pro distribution ships with codecs. I can see how a reasonable person would overload the term "QuickTime codec" to refer to the default codecs chosen by a popular video encoding app for the QuickTime architecture. In QuickTime 3 through 5, this was Sorenson video and QDesign audio; as of QuickTime 6, it is MPEG-4 advanced simple video and AAC audio.
Hmph. I moved to a Mac mini a few weeks ago, and decided that I would finish up ripping all my CD's. Up to then, they had all been ripped as flac, and I was converting from flac -> ogg as necessary.
.m4a (aac) file so something iTunes can handle.
Now, with iTunes on my main PC and my wife's laptop, i thought 'Wouldn't it be great if we could use a daap server and stream all our music?' So, I thought I would use iTunes to rip the rest of my cd's, and maybe convert my current flac files to ALAC. Then I could convert to ogg, and SURELY i could stream those.
That's when the drums of doom started playing.
First, I found that iTunes couldn't handle streaming off files. The Quicktime ogg plugin works okay for playing off the local hard drive, but no nice streaming from my daap server.
No problem, I'll convert to AAC and stream those.
(The drums started playing louder)
Then, I found there is no way to really get iTunes to play or convert FLAC files. There's a plugin, but I can't for the life of me get it to work. And , I found there was no ALAC -> anything, so I ran the risk of being locked into a format that was non portable.
No problem, I'll just find an opensource ripper to convert to FLAC, the to AAC.
(The drums started playing MUCH louder)
I started using 'abcde', a rather nifty shell script that rips and converts cd's to any of a number of formats, including FLAC. It even uses Freecddb for the track information.
But... On OSX, the only real way to easily rip CD tracks is to copy the AIFF files that OSX presents to you when it mounts the audio CD.
And FLAC does NOT like the particilar AIFF files OSX presents.
(The drums are deafening)
24 hours, a bunch of research and hacking on FLAC, I make a custom flac binaries that can handle the AIFF files. And there's the opensource 'faac' program that can convert the flac files to AAC.
Except.... the AAC files faac creates can't be streamed or played by iTunes. Something about the MP4 headers faac generates aren't compatable.
(THE DRUMS ARE IN MY HEAD!)
Another 24 hours of researching, and I come up with the MPEG4IP project at Cisco, which has a nifty little program called 'mp4creator', which is designed to create or modify mp4 files. It has an '--optimize' function which modifies the headers of an existing
I threw everything into a script, and now I can rip files on my Mac mini, store them as FLAC, and then convert and play them as AAC/M4a files via iTunes.
But Apple could have made things MUCH easier by making iTunes more open to other codecs or providing more information for others to creat iTunes codecs.
And now I find someone has written an ALAC converter, so I could have used the ALAC format to being with.
well THANK YOU. THANK YOU SO BLOODY MUCH!
With support for Apple Lossless now installed on all PCs and Macs with qucktime support, doesn't this effectively make FLAC a competitor to Apple Lossless?
Just something to think about.
I think, therefore I am an Atheist.
The DRM is added in the transport layer... the audio encoding algorithm itself has no concept of DRM. DRM can be added to FLAC in an OGG container, just as it is added to ALAC in a QuickTime container.
ALAC probably exists because of an algorithmic or patent-related reason.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I've recently begun ripping my entire CD collection to a network storage device in Apple Lossless format. I chose this particular method because I wanted a compressed (lossless) format and I wanted to be able to continue using iTunes as a frontend to rip and play my music (via mt-daapd).
.wav/.aiff has relied on iTunes and the underlying Quicktime framework from Apple. While I like the company and their products, its a comfort to know that an external decoding solution now exists.
My only concern was that until now, every method of converting from Apple Lossless back to raw
Well, they use an OS where almost every cheesy app does that. And certainly every "media-player". So why do they expect QT to behave any way but so?
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Quit trolling
"Cheesy app" certainly sums up QuickTime Player.
The funny thing is that it's exactly as crappy on OS X as windows. I love paying $129 for an new OS and have it immediately start spewing popups asking me for another $29. Real classy.
The only positive feature of the thing is the built-in Apple Logo which makes immune from objective criticism from Mac slaves.
I think one of the reasons why large companies should avoid standard codecs like MPEG is that they are afraid of getting sued. In today's everything-is-patented world, all standard codecs out there violate at least one patent somewhere, perhaps without even realizing it. Right or wrong, a company could, in the current climate, be sued for using one of those codecs. Individual users and developers of the codec are in the same boat, but they aren't as juicy a target as a large corporation, so the danger of them getting sued is a lot less. Even small companies might escape the crosshairs if they don't go around annoying the big sharks. But a patent holder who held off suing a bunch of individuals and small companies might change their mind and bring out the big guns once a large company with deep pockets made themselves a target.
Finally I can enjoy the content of the Apple Community on my Linux box!
How's Mercatur?
I agreee completely with your point about QT not being a codec etc.
As a point of information, the new version of QT due to be released with Tiger will support H.264, which [from everything I've seen] blows away MPEG-4. H.264 is also the codec that the vast majority of videoconferencing over IP systems use, so hopefully we'll see crossover products that allow live streaming videoconferences via QT at high quality.
One possible reason would be in order to stream to an AirPort Express with AirTunes. AirTunes uses a standard streaming protocol (RTSP), but streams the data in Apple Lossless format. Because of this, you currently require either a Mac OS X or Windows XP machine running iTunes to steam audio to the AirPort Express.
Being able to stream from Linux would certainly open up some new possibilities. And being able to transcode from Ogg Vorbis to ALAC in order to stream to an AirPort Express would be pretty cool (and is something you can't currently do under iTunes, even with the third-party Ogg Vorbis decoder plug-in).
Linux would still be missing the admin tools to configure the AirPort Express in the first place, but being able to stream from other OS's to AirTunes would be pretty cool.
Yaz.
Go to MacUpdate to download the plugin if you don't have it.
It's also worth noting that if you convert the FLAC files into WMA lossless, iTunes will convert them automatically for you into ALAC (apple lossess) and preserve tag information.
'Nuff said.
When's the official MPEG-4 lossless codec supposed to come out?
He's from Australia, and IIRC reverse-engineering laws are different there. I'm not so sure Apple can sue. But, hey, maybe he shouldn't fly to the States, where - hmm - Freedom Abounds (copyright by George Walker Bush) - remember Dimitri?.
Furthermore, he's made it very clear that Apple used a lot of things that had been published before.
I don't know much about the Australian law, though, pointers are appreciated.
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
Well, it doesn't blow away MPEG-4, because it's part of MPEG-4. H.264 is MPEG-4 Part 10. The codec implemented in QuickTime now that people refer to as MPEG-4 is actually MPEG-4 Part 2. MPEG-4 is a big standard.
H.264 is also one of the required codecs (and will probably be the preferred codec) for both rival high-def DVD standards. It's an amazing codec; it really does deliver amazing quality all the way from cell phone streams up through broadcast quality video (at bit rates that residential broadband connections can handle), up to 1080p high-definition (at bit rates similar to what MPEG-4 achieves with standard definition video).
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If you want to rip music in OS X, use iTunes. Don't drag those files off the CD. That's too slow anyway.
Go to itunes, go to 'conversion options' and set it to AIFF or WAV, depending on which you'd like.
Then rip your discs. Better yet, set it to auto rip on insert and just start inserting discs.
You really know how to make things difficult for yourself.
rented-a-tent? ;-);-);-)
xine orh stone/hitchh ikersguidetothegalaxy/images/hh_large_03.mov
mplayer --playlist
http://movies.apple.com/trailers/touc
in Linux ?
Apple - PLEASE Port these missing QT codecs.
It's not particularly difficult.
/ id xQuickTimeComponentCreation-date.html
And there's a lot of sample code, including a complete implementation of an audio codec (uLaw), here:
http://developer.apple.com/samplecode/QuickTime
Take it away.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
Want to write a QuickTime audio codec? Go here:
/ id xQuickTimeComponentCreation-date.html
http://developer.apple.com/samplecode/QuickTime
Grab one of the several example files, the most useful of which will be 'audiocodec', which is a complete implementation of the uLaw audio codec for QuickTime. Replace a few subroutines with your own. Test. Ship.
I mean, god, you'd think it was rocket science or something!
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.