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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.
...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...
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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...
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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?
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If you had used Windows or a Mac, or had used someone else's Mac, then you would need this encoder. The guys who helped make this encoder spent months working on this project, and continue to work on it. This might help push more people to use linux (to switch) and have more univeral applications.
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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.
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Sounds to me like a justification to make and distribute a free software FLAC QuickTime plugin so our friends burdened with the proprietary QuickTime implementation Apple distributes can play streaming FLAC data or play FLAC files.
I see no technical justification of Apple's Lossless format that convinces me it is superior to FLAC (of course, since Apple's Lossless format is only available in proprietary software, it will always lose for those that care about software freedom). Yet I'm sure people will use it and encourage others to use it because it is distributed with their proprietary software. In this way, it reminds me of the odd stance some people take with Ogg Vorbis versus MP3--they know that the Vorbis codec has performed at least as well as MP3 in many listening tests, they acknowledge that Ogg is a better encapsulation format (allowing for more expressive tags, for instance), and they insist on using "the best tool for the job". But they cave in to popular pressure to conform to using a lesser "tool" and endorse the continued use of MP3, sometimes even exclusively (which is really silly).
I hope nobody interprets what I'm writing as though this takes away from this new BSD-licensed Apple Lossless decoder. I'm grateful for what has been done here--it was needed and it is a great contribution to the free software community. I think there's a great future for it at archive.org in case anyone submits audio encoded with Apple's Lossless codec. This could allow archive.org to decode that and re-encode it with something else (many archive.org recordings are encoded many ways). However, when I distribute losslessly encoded copies of audio, I'll continue to dismiss Apple's Lossless codec out of hand and prefer FLAC. I help manage the website for a locally-produced talk radio show called "News from Neptune" and there you can find copies of the show encoded in FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, and Speex. FLAC serves our needs excellently.
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