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.

Comments

How long before Apple sues?

[alexwcovington]

They seem to be cracking down on their most enthusiatic community members lately.

Pardon me for asking...

[winstonmeister]

...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...

Re:Pardon me for asking...

[SuperQ]

According to an article by a developer of the Rio Karma, they needed something that could be decoded by the iPod's CPU.

The Rev 1-3 iPods have a smaller CPU cache than the Rio Karma, or the iPod Rev 4 and the iPod Mini. The preformance hit for accessing memory while decoding is too great, so you must fit the decoder in the cache.

ALAC was designed for the simple reason that it has a smaller decoder on the iPod than FLAC.

Same reason why OGG can't be used on iPod Rev 1-3. (and for consistancy, not on the other two) Not enough CPU cache to decode.

Re:Pardon me for asking...

[burris]

Could be because the author of FLAC used to brag about how FLAC losslessly encoded all DRM into zero bits. Maybe Apple felt like it needed it's own format to "protect" the connection to AirportExpress and whatever else they have up their sleeve. Maybe it's because people at Apple are somewhat isolated in an Ivory Tower and weren't aware of FLAC. Maybe they looked at flac and decided it wasn't going anywhere. Maybe they flipped a coin.

Re:Pardon me for asking...

[gl4ss]

there's a better reason than the already mentioned ipod cpu..

now it's their format - possibly with a compression scheme they got a patent going for, so they own it.

why did sony keep insisting on atrac so long? because it was their format, their control. if it had made it big then they could have cashed on it.

true, itunes supports mp3's and ipods do as well - but they have to, nobody would have used them otherwise.

Re:Pardon me for asking...

[mrchaotica]

In addition to SuperQ's answer regarding the iPod, they needed a codec that could be encoded in realtime, to work with the Airport Express. FLAC is significantly smaller, but it takes significantly longer to encode so it wasn't suitable for their purpose.

Re:Pardon me for asking...

[crazney]

I don't really believe that. As I mention on the web page, ALAC is very similar to FLAC - however it is slightly more complicated, not less. It requires more CPU power to decode ALAC than it does to decode FLAC. That said, it should generally have a better rate of compression.

Re:Pardon me for asking...

[damiam]

Same reason why OGG can't be used on iPod Rev 1-3

I wouldn't say that quite so authoritatively. At the moment, the reason Vorbis can't be played on the ipod is because no one's put much effort into optimizing the decoder. It may be that it's impossible, but I've heard several Vorbis and iPodLinux developers say they think the iPod has the potential to play Vorbis, albeit maybe with reduced battery life.

Re:Pardon me for asking...

[Tyler Eaves]

Huh? I could encode flac at over 15x realtime on my old Athlon 900.

Re:Pardon me for asking...

[ergo98]

Right. And when you play audio from your PC, generally you want it to start playing on the Airport Express immediately, and in real time -- matching the audio playing on your PC. Ergo, realtime.

I'm not really sure how the grandparent post confused you.

Re:Pardon me for asking...

[Anonymous Coward]

FLAC is significantly smaller, but it takes significantly longer to encode

That's a lie.

Re:Pardon me for asking...

[Wesley Felter]

Because the iPod was designed to have just enough CPU power to do what it was designed to do: play MP3s. (In retrospect this was not a smart decision, but most embedded devices don't plan for future upgrades either.) The other codecs were added years later.

Re:Pardon me for asking...

[ergo98]

I'm not really sure, but rather am giving my interpretation. It could have to do with the granularity of the various codecs as well - e.g. When you're playing in realtime, you can't process a minute of the song over 10 seconds (greater than real-time, but in such a coarse chunk) and then send it all through -- you have to continually feed the very shallow play buffer of the airport express. I can see this having specific codec requirements that wouldn't be a concern for FLAC.

Re:Pardon me for asking...

[znu]

Um, no. Apple is a major backer of MPEG-4, and has adopted, promoted or created many other standards, from FireWire to ZeroConf to LDAP.

Anyway, how does ALAC lock in customers? iTunes can convert files encoded with it to AAC, MP3 or AIFF.

Re:Pardon me for asking...

[yawweb]

So, I have to ask a question, having looked at your site.

Why bother with reverse engineering ALAC? So far, I have seen / read mention of only one major useful thing that has been learned: ALAC uses adaptive compression algorithms.

You state on your site that you don't like being locked into restrictive DRM formats. So, don't allow yourself to get locked into it. Don't support it.

Given the information you have gathered about the format, it seems to me that it would be far more productive to join the FLAC team, and work with them towards adding adaptive compression to FLAC.

IMO, it's through direct support of open projects such as OggVorbis and FLAC, and companies that are willing to implement these open products (such as iRiver) that we will end up with products that work the way we want them to.

Re:Pardon me for asking...

[Apotsy]

ALAC is based on, and for all I know is just a straightforward implementation of, the MPEG-4 lossless audio codec. And Apple is a pretty big supporter MPEG-4, so it's not surprising they would use it. (The MPEG-4 lossless codec is in turn based on something called LPAC.)

Now, this is pure speculation, but I think one of the reasons why large companies avoid open source codecs like FLAC or Xvid is that they are afraid of getting sued. In today's everything-is-patented world, many open source codecs out there probably 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. It's certainly a risk many large companies might shy away from. By using stuff from a consortium like MPEG, which has probably used some expensive IP lawyers to verify all their stuff as being on the up and up with respect to patents, companies can shield themselves somewhat from that risk.

Re:Pardon me for asking...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't really believe that. As I mention on the web page, ALAC is very similar to FLAC - however it is slightly more complicated, not less. It requires more CPU power to decode ALAC than it does to decode FLAC. That said, it should generally have a better rate of compression.

Huh? Comparison tests have found that ALAC compression is, on average, slightly worse than FLAC.

http://members.home.nl/w.speek/comparison.htm
http://flac.sourceforge.net/comparison.html

Re:Pardon me for asking...

[ArbitraryConstant]

Optimizing at a level that low is counter-intuitive. An algorithm that's more "complicated" might take up less memory or have a more favorable memory access pattern. For example, and I have no idea of the difference between FLAC and ALAC so this is just an example, if a more complicated algorithm has a larger number of stages but they all fit in cache when they're running, it could easily perform better.

For example, Google for "AlphaSort". Basically, they made a mutli-phase sort where the initial stage fit entirely in the cache of the DEC Alpha computers they were using, and beat the crap out of the alternatives. By that I mean they beat a Cray Y-MP by a factor of 4.

Re:Pardon me for asking...

[Anonymous Coward]

How exactly does a company avoid patent infringment by writing their own code, instead of using and contributing to someone elses code? Apple could well be infringing on any number of patents with ALAC (Not that I think they are), just as easily as they could with FLAC (Again, not that I think FLAC infringes). In todays climate, any code can easily infringe and large companies like Apple have legal departments whos job it is to perform patent searches for any code they're working on. It is just as easy to perform a search on a peice of Open Source code as it is on their own in house code.

Re:Pardon me for asking...

[znu]

Apple only uses open standards when they are forced to do so by the market.

No, sorry, who forced Apple to support MPEG-4? They were on board right from the start. The MPEG-4 file format is based on QuickTime's file format. This is even more true of FireWire and ZeroConf. Who forced Apple to base their new directory system on LDAP? Who forced Apple to open their kernel? Who forces Apple to contribute to various open source projects? Who forces Apple to use Open Firmware for their hardware? Who forces Apple to allow Final Cut Pro to export project information in XML?

So you don't think that WMA or WMV locks in customers either, then?

Not if Microsoft makes it trivial for people to convert them to open formats, no. I don't know if this is the case, as I haven't used WMP much.

Re:Pardon me for asking...

[cbrocious]

You're very, very far off.

ALAC has absolutely nothing to do with the MPEG-4 lossless encoding. (I should know, as I worked on the decoder as well. See the authors list on the site)
This is a common misconception that having an opensource decoder (and encoder soon... I have a prototype already) will hopefully fix.

Re:Pardon me for asking...

[chris234]

So, what does ALAC have to do with DRM? Hmm?

Re:Pardon me for asking...

[DavidTC]

To keep people from having to read that, FLAC is not significantly smaller (1), but a hell of a lot faster if you use it right.

The important stats:
FLAC at 8 took 55:02 to encode, 7:07 to decode, at a ratio of 1:0.5437.

ALAC took 19:53 to encode, and 10:01 to decode, at a ratio of 1:0.5496.

So, yes, FLAC at the tightest takes much longer than ALAC. (Alghought it's only 3/4th the CPU to play!)

However FLAC at 5 took 12:54 to encode and 7:08 to decode, at a ration of 1:0.5459. Much faster than ALAC, barely smaller, and decodes much easier than ALAC.

So, yes, if you ramp FLAC all the way up it takes much longer to encode, and slightly longer to decode, and you don't gain anything. So obviously doing that is a bit silly unless you're talking about long term storage.

If you leave it at the default, though, it beats ALAC in every single way, unless there's some differences in CPU architechure that changes the relative decoding difficulties between an iPod and a PC. Which isn't that impossible. But I have to point out that a lot of people use iTunes sans iPod, on a PC.

1) No lossless compression is significantly smaller than anything else. All the serious contenders are between 1:0.56 and 1:0.48 or so.

Re:Pardon me for asking...

[yabos]

How are there different encoding qualities with a lossless codec?

Re:Pardon me for asking...

[Refrag]

They needed cheap transcoding to a lossless format for the AirPort Express. Read the streaming sound section of this article.

Re:Pardon me for asking...

[line.at.infinity]

So you don't think that WMA or WMV locks in customers either, then? That's good to hear, otherwise you would be a hypocrite.

There are some differences. WMA is a problem because if you encode something in WMA, then transcode it to MP3, for example, you lose quality. If you convert Apple Lossless to MP3, you don't lose any quality compared to encoding it directly to MP3 without the ALAC step. Apple lossless doesn't lock-in because it can be a reasonable intermediary step. Every iTunes with an Apple Lossless encoder has had a decoder with it. iTunes has been available for both x86 and PowerPC platforms, while on the other hand AVI files that use Windows Media codec have not been supported on Macs because of Microsoft's refusal to support AVIs (along with MPG, MP3) on their media player for the Macs. MS VCM on the other hand creates WMV files that lock in users to the Windows operating system.

Re:Pardon me for asking...

[jnana]

"Quality" means the resultant size of the output -- i.e., the ratio of output size to input size is smaller for a higher setting (at the cost of more cpu cycles).

Re:Pardon me for asking...

[cookd]

Not quality. It's effort. How much effort do you spend looking for additional ways to squeeze out a few more bytes.

ZIP has the same thing. ZIP -9 usually gets 1%-5% better compression, depending on what you're compressing. IIRC, it uses a larger window to do this. In other words, if you repeat yourself every, say, 32k, ZIP -9 would notice the repetition and be able to compress it out, but ZIP -5 would not.

Re:Pardon me for asking...

[yabos]

Ah, I see. Good explaination, thanks.

Re:Pardon me for asking...

[Apotsy]

They don't write the codec. The standards group does. They just license it. That limits their liability.

Re:Pardon me for asking...

[Apotsy]

Oops, hit submit to soon. To address the point of patent searching, this is also done by the standards group, not the company that licenses the result (which is usually semi-guaranteed to be free from patent violations, which is definitely not true for grassroots open source codecs). This mitigates cost and risk.

Re:Pardon me for asking...

[Anonymous Coward]

You have wireless routers with almost-GHz processors in them?

Thought not. It probably has a 250mhz amd Geode or something similar, if it has a general purpose processor at all and doesn't entirely run in gate-level hardware designed specifically for the task.

Re:Pardon me for asking...

[Ziviyr]

adding adaptive compression to FLAC

In what way is FLAC's compression not adaptive?

Re:Pardon me for asking...

[Hooded One]

Same way there are different compression rates for zip, gzip, etc. which are all lossless. Basically, the higher the compression ratio, the more time it spends looking for patterns to compress.

Re:Pardon me for asking...

[vought]

I take exception to your description of the PP5002C/5003 as "just enough" to decode .mp3. That's not accurate.

The PP5002C/5003 is based around a dual-core ARM7 CPU, and with the multimedia extensions and I/O logic added by Portal Player, the 5002C/5003 are more than capable of encoding or decoding video and audio content simultaneously.

I think your assumption that Apple used "just enough" power to get the .mp3 decoding job done is seriously flawed.

Re:Pardon me for asking...

[dgatwood]

Actually, the argument that it was designed to have "just enough" CPU power is flawed. The argument, as you reworded it, that Apple uses "just enough" power is, oddly enough, precisely correct, I think. Very fine line.

...as in power management.... While the CPU can probably do some serious work at full throttle, there's always a tradeoff between that and battery life.

Re:Pardon me for asking...

[dgatwood]

Two 70 MHz ARM cores. Yeah, should be more than three times the horsepower needed. Reportedly, Tremor can function in as slow as a single 40 MHz core.

Of course, I don't know if the cores are symmetric, and I think the iPod Linux stuff only supports the primary core, so in its current state, no, it probably isn't possible....

At least conceptually, to get decent performance you want to do something like the following:

1. Set up a worker thread on the main core (under Linux or whatever) that fetches blocks from the disk and places them in a ring buffer at a fixed memory location.
2. Halt the second core, load a program into memory that does the decoding of a particular audio type from the ring buffer, set the PC of the second core to that program, and run it.
3. The second core will shove raw audio data at the hardware, or if it can't access the hardware directly (not sure), you might end up doing a second ring buffer.
4. Power manage the heck out of the primary core. Nap it unless it is doing something.

Once you get that working, -then- work on real-time Ogg decoding. It should be a lot easier to get real-time decoding if you aren't trying to do all your work on a single core....

Re:Pardon me for asking...

[mrchaotica]

Not that I'm disagreeing with you or anything, but how do you use iTunes to convert ALAC to AIFF? I mean obviously it can play the file, but there doesn't seem to be an easy way to merely convert it to another format and save it as a file, with the metadata intact.

Re:Pardon me for asking...

[mrchaotica]

Hmm... you know what? I've never used FLAC at anything but "best" quality. Oops.

Re:Pardon me for asking...

[vought]

Good point. Thanks fer postin'.

Re:Pardon me for asking...

[koekepeer]

"Now, this is pure speculation, but I think one of the reasons why large companies avoid open source codecs like FLAC or Xvid is that they are afraid of getting sued. In today's everything-is-patented world, many open source codecs out there probably 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."

in principle this is a good argument, where it not that they also have to make sure that their *own* codecs are free of any patent infringement. using and open source codec that wa written from scratch (like FLAC or OGG) would only cost them the legal fees required to ensure this, and save them on software production costs. my guess is that they either miss some features in FLAC (but that cuold be resolved in collaboration) or that they just want control. the latter seems the more valid option IMO.

Re:Pardon me for asking...

[Anonymous Coward]

Look, you crazed Apple fag... as has already been pointed out, ALAC uses more CPU and memory than FLAC. Apple did it so they can control the format -- ala Microsoft. Get over it.

Re:Pardon me for asking...

[sokoban]

I have a large collection of shn and flac files and keep them converted to alac for use on my iPod. The ALACs usually end up smaller than the flacs. The difference is usually on the 5-10 MB per GB range. That said, I would rather have a quicktime element to handle FLAC files than a non-quicktime ALAC encoder. I've heard the Quicktime addons are hard to write though.

Re:Pardon me for asking...

[clarkcox3]

1. Go to iTunes' Preferences dialog
2. Choose the "Importing" pane
3. Select "AIFF Encoder" from the "Import Using" popup
4. Click "OK"
5. Go to iTunes' Main window
6. Select your music
7. Choose "Convert Selection to AIFF" from the "Advanced" menu

Little use to me....

[Cougem]

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.

Re:Little use to me....

[jsm008us]

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.

Re:Little use to me....

[mrchaotica]

I have a Mac as well as several Linux machines, and an ALACFLAC conversion tool would be great for me.

I actually thought about writing one myself by hooking into Quicktime, but I never got around to learning the API.

Re:Little use to me....

[laffer1]

Lossless is part of iTunes and therefore part of Windows and Mac versions of iTunes (and probably quicktime)

Re:Little use to me....

[dangitman]

Haven't you ever heard of iTunes and Quicktime for Windows?

Re:Little use to me....

[TylerL82]

I heard a duck say "ALACFLAC" on TV once.
I think it was selling insurance.

Re:Little use to me....

[marmoset]

True story. Yesterday I was sitting at work, at my Linux box, and decided that I wanted to hear a particular song I had sitting on one of my OSX boxes at home. Scp the song from home to the office and I'm good to go, right?

Great, except that the song at home was encoded as Apple Lossless.

I could have actually used this tool yesterday. :)

Yes but...

[FiReaNGeL]

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...

Re:Yes but...

[znu]

I seriously doubt Apple has the slightest interest in suing over this. Unlike Real's attempt to sell copy-protected music that worked on the iPod, this is not an attempt by a commercial competitor to cash in on Apple's success, nor is it likely to hurt Apple's revenues or profits in any conceivable way.

Re:Yes but...

[thopkins]

Actually no, refer to this comment:
http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?si d=141499&c id=11855178

Re:Yes but...

[Not The Real Me]

And what is the relationship between this and the Quicktime video codec?

I'd love to watch Quicktime movies or be able to capture Quicktime streams without requiring the Apple Quicktime video codec, much less being forced to install the Apple Quicktime player.

Small correction

[bajo77]

This initial release is version is 0.1, not 1.0

though, is it patent encumbered?

[gl4ss]

gif-like, could i use it in a real project?

Re:though, is it patent encumbered?

[crazney]

Well, it uses fairly well known algorithms, so it's unlikely.

Stream Ripping?

[CtrlPhreak]

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?

Re:Stream Ripping?

[crazney]

Hey,

I'm the author of the decoder in quesiton.

I originally started doing the decoder so I could have my own little Airport Express emulator.

However, Apple have (for once) secured their system pretty well, and I have been unable to break their encryption so far. I know exactly what I need to do, and I'm fairly confident that I'll be able to do it... But first I actually need to get one of these devices.

So yeah, It's certinately on the table. Shouldn't be too far off.

Re:Stream Ripping?

[josephtd]

Just as soon as you get the private key that is in the Airport Express.

Re:Stream Ripping?

[Vaevictis666]

The real question is can this be used to stream *to* the Airport Express from any arbitrary program?

Re:Stream Ripping?

[sqrt529]

the encryption is already hacked: http://nanocrew.net/blog/apple/revairtunes.html
There is also an C implementation of sf.net (raop-play).

Re:Stream Ripping?

[crazney]

Nope. That's the public key that's been hacked - that lets you encrypt data. Decrypting data requires the private key. This has not been hacked yet.

David

Re:Stream Ripping?

[cbrocious]

We need the private key to intercept the stream.

(I came up with a hackish solution that will work while we work on this stuff, but we need something permanent, which only getting the private key will give us)

Re:Stream Ripping?

[sqrt529]

you are right! i did not think enough about it since my goal was to stream to the airport.

it'll probably much harder to extract the private key since it is contained only in the airport express hardware and not as easily accessible as that one in the itunes software.

Re:Stream Ripping?

[Leo McGarry]

That's not supported, and it's not something that can't already be done better using other solutions.

No, I stand by my remark: there is zero legitimate reason to try to break the AirPort Express encryption scheme. It will only help the pirates, and deter companies like Apple from innovating in the future.

Re:Stream Ripping?

[crazney]

That's not at all true, the only reason I want it for is entirely legitimate.

I have all my music stored in iTunes, and I'd like to be able to play them on a 'remote speaker'. The remote speaker in question is my media server, connected to my stereo.

All the computers in my house I have access to, and none of them are DRM-protected music (ie, iTMS purchased music). So there is no reason for me to want to use Airport Express data for any sort of piracy.

Re:Stream Ripping?

[gekko513]

I don't think that gives you any more legitimate reasons to break the protection. It would be much easier and much more legitimate to create a module that stream the music that is unprotected and "stored in your iTunes". It probably alreasy exists.

Re:Stream Ripping?

[crazney]

I have music in iTunes because that way I can easily sync to my ipod, it's also the best software available to organise music collections.

Will we ban knives because they are a tool for killing people, and killing people is illegal?

There is a fine line. If a tool has significant legal (and moral) uses, I see no problem with it.

Re:Stream Ripping?

[OneDeeTenTee]

No, I stand by my remark: there is zero legitimate reason to try to break the AirPort Express encryption scheme

Curiousity?

Re:Stream Ripping?

[lachlan76]

And uhh...what about the obvious: using a non-apple device as a remote speaker?

Re:Stream Ripping?

[2TecTom]

OMG. dood, are you for real? If anyone sucks, well... Actually, the real and only reason for hacking DRM, and the one you are ignoring, is to counter the power that these corrupt corporations have given themselves contrary to the common good. Go ahead, justify greed all you want, however, all it looks like to me, and others, is a closed mind standing by unquestioned assumptions and self serving beliefs.

First off, just because it's the "law" doesn't ensure that it's the right or "ethical" thing to do. For instance, somehow I feel that you are less ethical than the person you're attacking. In the second regard, you can go on and on all you want about copyright infringement being illegal but the fact of the matter is that in many parts of the world it is not nor was it ever intended to be this draconian by those who first proposed it, in this and other first world countries. Third, and the real issue, is the DRM schemes and IP laws are immoral and should be resisted by all those who support an individual's intrinsic and inalienable rights.

Personally, I'm just getting so tired of here the same old bs marketing lies, over and over and ....

Re:Stream Ripping?

[2TecTom]

So sorry, but it should have read, Personally, I'm just getting so tired of hearing the same old bs marketing lies, over and over and ....

(^*%$ spellchequer ;~)

Re:Stream Ripping?

[Leo McGarry]

OMG. dood

That was as far as I got. I couldn't stomach any more.

Re:Stream Ripping?

[Leo McGarry]

I never said it was illegal. I said it was a massive waste of time, because the only conceivable benefit will be to people who want to steal things.

In that sense, it's obviously unethical.

Re:Stream Ripping?

[swillden]

I said it was a massive waste of time, because the only conceivable benefit will be to people who want to steal things. In that sense, it's obviously unethical.

It's unethical to waste time?

Re:Stream Ripping?

[runderwo]

The knife analogy is quite adept. Someone has created a tool with multiple uses. The set of all uses of the tool can be partitioned two different ways - between right and wrong uses, and between legal and illegal uses. You seem to be arguing that because the tool has potential illegal use, that any legal use is thus irrelevant.

Unfortunately for your argument, the courts have repeatedly held up the right to engineer tools which have significant legal use, even if that happens to be paired unfortunately with significant illegal use. I happen to think making engineers liable for the use of their tools would have a chilling effect on new development, but that's just me.

Re:Stream Ripping?

[Leo McGarry]

Are you trying to be funny, or are you just not getting it?

I make a thing. This thing serves no useful purpose, but criminals can use it to kill a lot of people. I knew that going it, but I do it anyway. Is it ethical for me to make this thing? No.

I make a thing. This thing serves no useful purpose, but criminals can use it to destroy a lot of property. I knew that going it, but I do it anyway. Is it ethical for me to make this thing? No.

I make a thing. This thing serves no useful purpose, but criminals can use it to rob banks. I knew that going it, but I do it anyway. Is it ethical for me to make this thing? No.

I make a thing. This thing serves no useful purpose, but criminals can use it to steal music. I knew that going it, but I do it anyway. Is it ethical for me to make this thing? No.

Any of this sinking in?

Re:Stream Ripping?

[ratsnapple tea]

Leo, you brighten my day, really you do... but I have to ask, from whence comes such bitterness, such contempt for your fellow man, to supply your good geyser of bile?

Re:Stream Ripping?

[mbaciarello]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't breaking this encryption fall under the DMCA definition of illegal breaking?

Not that I would shed a tear if it would, but AFAICT the DMCA only allows for cracking in the name of "research."

This paragraph, defining who is exempt from prosecution for cracking an encryption, is particularly funny:

`(A) whether the information derived from the encryption research was disseminated, and if so, whether it was disseminated in a manner reasonably calculated to advance the state of knowledge or development of encryption technology, versus whether it was disseminated in a manner that facilitates infringement under this title or a violation of applicable law other than this section, including a violation of privacy or breach of security;

Again, IANAL, but it seems to me the law doesn't care about user convenience in this case. In order for cracking to be legal, it looks as though there has to be a "scientific" interest such as verifying vulnerabilities in the encryption.

Again if I'm not wrong, Jon's defence was that it enabled users to make their rightful backup copies of DVDs. I can hardly see the need to break AirPort encryption for backups. Yes, I do realize the very legal uses of it, but are they rights granted by law?

I'm afraid a judge would rather look at the illegal actions (e.g., bypassing DRMs, breaking a company's encryption software, facilitation of privacy violation) than the legal, but not "protected," uses. Maybe a solution would be to publish the result in the form of a technical paper focusing on security (or lack thereof) of the algorithm?

Re:Stream Ripping?

[2TecTom]

Well, since you seem to be offended, it seems as if my attempt at communication was completely successful. Perhaps if you can't deal with the issues, your position is not as well thought out or as defensible as you've made it out to be.

Again the question I have, and the issue I've been discussing is, are current IP laws worthy of respect and observance? I, and many other credible people do not believe they are. As such, we feel it is our duty to take a stand against them. I'm curious, which part of this don't you understand or are unable to agree with? Well, or are you to proud to discuss this with us lower class idiots? Eh?

Re:Stream Ripping?

[runderwo]

And you were wrong anyway.

That's your opinion.

No, the analogy is not apt, because a knife has many non-trivial uses. Breaking the encryption that makes AirPort Express work would have no non-trivial uses that didn't relate directly to stealing music.

The author already named one. You don't get to judge whether it's trivial or not. And you certainly don't get to assume that everyone would use the tool in the manner you would use it (i.e., to "steal music").

We have to weigh the potential good that can come of breaking the encryption against the potential ill.

Who's 'we'? It's an individual moral decision. If you don't want to break the encryption, don't download the tool and break it. The program is just a set of instructions. Do you also have a problem with people who publish instructions on how to pick locks?

Apple's success as a company is hindered, which is bad because Apple gives us wonderful things.

Your mouth seems to be foaming. Reality check: Apple doesn't give you anything. Apple offers you products and services in exchange for your money. If your argument is that people who break encryption schemes cost you money as an Apple customer, it'd be much more honest to frame your arugment that way instead of pretending to have some kind of moral high ground. Then it's the author's option to be a nice guy and not release a public tool to break the encryption. Somehow your attitude makes me think that you'd rather have a law that forces him to be a nice guy, under threat of prison.

Dealing with content security issues is a cost of doing business in the media industry. Underpinning the technological approaches to security is an assumption that most people agree with the copyright bargain, and that technological methods will keep them on the honest side of the line. If people are clamoring to violate copyrights and just looking for the tools to do so, that's a social problem - and the solution is not to outlaw the tools, it's to reexamine the copyright framework and bring it more in line with popular sentiment. I'm sure shareholders and fanboys of media companies would disagree, but fortunately, you only get one vote just like the rest of us.

Now, finally, do you understand why your knife analogy is the acme of stupidity? It's recklessly inapt.

I understand why you would think so, having revealed your underlying bias. It's understandable that a reasonable approach would be irrelevant when one's thoughts are dominated by the threat of having a higher sticker price. But you still have provided no convincing moral argument dictating that engineers should be responsible for how people use their tools, and furthermore to foresee all such uses.

The only convincing premise in your argument is that piracy costs media companies money, and that such a tool could be used for piracy. Kind of like how killing people is wrong, and that a knife can be used to kill people. You seem to think that by default things should be illegal unless it can be proved (in your moral domain) that they have a "good" use. That's not the spirit of freedom, but I'd have to admit it's becoming a more and more common approach in the US these days, since everyone has a moral agenda they want encoded into law now, because they can't stand the thought that anyone else would have a different value system from theirs.

By the way, you need to check your dictionary too before flaming others for improper verbage.

Re:Stream Ripping?

[Leo McGarry]

You don't get to judge whether it's trivial or not.

Of course I do. Why don't I? I'm as entitled to an opinion as anybody else.

Who's 'we'?

Everybody. People. Human beings.

It's an individual moral decision.

Correct, and in this case, the person in question has made the wrong individual moral decision.

Do you also have a problem with people who publish instructions on how to pick locks?

Yes, I do, but not much of one because picking a lock isn't a reasonable way to steal something in most cases. A better analogy would be to ask whether I have a problem with people who publish instructions on how to weaponize anthrax or build a bomb out of an artillery shell. That's the type of thing we're talking about here. Zero practical use, massive potential for harm.

Somehow your attitude makes me think that you'd rather have a law that forces him to be a nice guy, under threat of prison.

Straw man. Move on.

If people are clamoring to violate copyrights and just looking for the tools to do so, that's a social problem

Agreed. And part of the solution to that social problem is for law-abiding people to wise up, take responsibility and stop providing thieves with the tools they need to steal things.

having revealed your underlying bias

Straw man. Move on.

The only convincing premise in your argument is that piracy costs media companies money, and that such a tool could be used for piracy.

So you weren't persuaded by the whole "piracy is wrong, and such a tool can only be used for piracy" thing? I guess now we're getting to see your underlying biases, huh?

That's not the spirit of freedom, but I'd have to admit it's becoming a more and more common approach in the US these days, since everyone has a moral agenda they want encoded into law now

Yup. There we go. Underlying biases all over the place.

Re:Stream Ripping?

[swillden]

I was trying to be funny, or, more precisely, pointing out the humorous implication of your statement. However, you're the one who's not getting it. The guy who wants to do this has told you why it's valuable to him, yet you continue to claim that it has no value.

Re:Stream Ripping?

[Leo McGarry]

The guy who wants to do this has told you why it's valuable to him, yet you continue to claim that it has no value.

That's it, right there. You've hit the nail right on the head, and yet you don't even see it. The fact that somebody says he thinks it's valuable doesn't mean that it actually is. In this case, he's wrong in his estimation.

Just because somebody thinks something has value doesn't mean that it actually does. See? There's objective truth here, and he's on the wrong side of it, as we've covered already in depth.

Re:Stream Ripping?

[swillden]

The fact that somebody says he thinks it's valuable doesn't mean that it actually is. In this case, he's wrong in his estimation.

Okay, thanks. Next time I need to know if something is valuable, I'll be sure to drop you a line, since you have this uncanny ability to see what *really* matters to other people, even when they think differently.

Re:Stream Ripping?

[runderwo]

You don't get to judge whether it's trivial or not.

Of course I do. Why don't I? I'm as entitled to an opinion as anybody else.

Because this is triviality that is determined in court, according to the copyright code. Are you intentionally being dense, or what?

Correct, and in this case, the person in question has made the wrong individual moral decision

And here's the problem. Your moral system is different from his. Therefore, your judgement is irrelevant. Unfortunately, you seem to think he should care for some reason. In order for him to care, you would need to provide objective evidence that he is doing something that is wrong in both of your moral systems. You have failed to provide such evidence, so your claims are vacuous.

A better analogy would be to ask whether I have a problem with people who publish instructions on how to weaponize anthrax or build a bomb out of an artillery shell. That's the type of thing we're talking about here. Zero practical use, massive potential for harm.

I find it interesting that you are making a mountain out of a molehill in desperate defense. Anyway, you wouldn't find knowing how these things work to be of zero practical use if you were one attempting to defend yourself against them. You are operating under one of two assumptions:

• such devices would not exist unless the instructions to create them were published, or
• publishing the instructions would cause more people to attempt to build them, and the total damage of the weapons built according to the instructions would exceed the total damage prevented by people who made use of the instructions for defense.

And part of the solution to that social problem is for law-abiding people to wise up, take responsibility and stop providing thieves with the tools they need to steal things.

I don't know where you live, but in the USA, we are innocent until proven guilty. Presuming that each one of us is a thief just waiting for the right tools to come along is not going to be a popular opinion. It's even less popular when you fail to provide evidence that this is actually the case.

So you weren't persuaded by the whole "piracy is wrong,

No, not particularly. In fact, I believe it is beneficial in certain circumstances. I also happen to think casual nonprofit copying is the only thing keeping the media cartels alive at this point, but moving right along...

and such a tool can only be used for piracy" thing?

This is what you've repeately failed to demonstrate, which is not surprising, given that the original author cited a use which was not piracy - contradicting your position before you even started.

In any case, the published source code would be considered both speech and a tool. Would you have the same problem with a published set of steps in plain English to accomplish the same? The only difference is that one can be compiled and the other can't, but it seems to me that might be where you are hung up on this.

Or how about if the author happens to foresee an infringing use (or is warned by a busybody such as yourself), he places a disclaimer on the work stating that the information is not to be used for copyright infringement purposes. Somehow I think you'd have a problem with that too - "Oh, that'd just give them IDEAS!"

I guess now we're getting to see your underlying biases, huh?

That I think publishing information should not be restricted in the case that information might cause someone to make less money than they might have otherwise, and where no other pre-existing contract would have prevented it? Guilty as charged. My biases are very clearly laid out. I don't think this would be a reasonable restriction on speech at all. It would demolish open source development almost immediately,

questions

[Anonymous Coward]

if i compile this on Linux will MPlayer pick it up and use it? or will XMMS pick it up and use it???

Re:questions

[cbrocious]

Not yet. There are people working to integrate it into ffmpeg/libavcodec... from there it should work in MPlayer at least.

Now we're just waiting for:

[Sebastian Jansson]

Windows Media Audio 9 Lossless released as open source from MS. Maybe Apple isn't the new Microsoft after all?

Re:Now we're just waiting for:

[damiam]

Why would this decoder cause you to expect a release from MS? It's not like Apple released their own decoder; someone else reverse-engeneered it.

Re:Let us rejoice!

[delta_avi_delta]

Yes, but I'd find it highly doubtful that Quictime, lossy video compression extraordinaire, would uses ALAC for sound... does it?

Well, I won't use it

[maynard]

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

Re:Well, I won't use it

[Cougem]

Surely that's a reason to use it? This is third party, allowing you to use the formal without their OS....

Re:Well, I won't use it

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok honey... illegaly porting someone's software is not covered under free speech rights. Apple might not do anything about it as long as it's not in direct conflict with their interests, but remember this... this doesn't make itlegal.

Re:Well, I won't use it

[jbloggs]

wait..so you mean they're a company thats for profit?

Re:Well, I won't use it

[geekee]

" 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"

Nice spin. Substitute MS for Apple in your post and everyone and everyone would say you were spreading FUD.Remeber when Apple sued the creator of playfair? This guy is next. Apple has always been just like MS. I'm surprised it took people this long to notice. Remember when they put all the clone makers out of business? They refuse to port their OS to x86 because they're using their software to sell their proprietary hardware solution. Try reverse engieering their BIOS to make a clone and they'll sue you into oblivion. Lucky for the rest of us non-MAC users, Compaq was successful at reverse engineering IBM's BIOS

Re:Well, I won't use it

[maynard]

They refuse to port their OS to x86 because they're using their software to sell their proprietary hardware solution.

"Share and enjoy!" darwinx86-602.iso.gz

"Why, it tastes not quite unlike tea!"

Re:Well, I won't use it

[krel]

Remeber when Apple sued the creator of playfair?

No, when was that?

Lucky for the rest of us non-MAC users...

It's not MAC, it's Mac. It's an abbreviation Macintosh, not an acronym.

Re:Well, I won't use it

[blackdragon7777]

No not really. Speech can't ruin somebody else's property like a virus can.

Re:Well, I won't use it

[TheRaven64]

Long-term Apple followers are still trying to get to grips with seeing Apple in this rôle...

Nice!

[penginkun]

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!

Re:Nice!

[AaronLawrence]

easytree.org? There doesn't seem to be any policy that you can't download pirated stuff. In fact it looks like the standard kind of "pretend best efforts" piracy site.
Enlighten us then...

Re:Nice!

[bbc]

"Piece of advice for ya skippy, how about you head over to Google and see what comes up when you put in "EasyTree"."

Why on earth would your run-of-the-mill RIAA shill want to do that? After all, he has already trolled his response from you.

If you think they've been doing that "lately",

[mcc]

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

Re:If you think they've been doing that "lately",

[Timo_UK]

The media probably only reacted now because one of their own was sued.

Re:If you think they've been doing that "lately",

[mcc]

You don't need to be a "big J Journalist" to have freedom of the press.

The law should either apply to small and large media sources alike, or apply to none of them.

Re:If you think they've been doing that "lately",

[Have Blue]

That's at least partly because no one has ever tried to defend the "right to leak" before; they just gave up the info and it blew over quickly.

Re:If you think they've been doing that "lately",

[Lars T.]

Doh. That's what they are afraid of. That the judge decided that the law applies to all media, not just blogs.

Re:If you think they've been doing that "lately",

[value_added]

Apple ... like rabid dogs on a barbeque-sauce-covered Pre-K student.

The symptoms for rabies includes a lot of things, but barbeque sauce and pre-K students aren't included. Most often a dog will be appear extremely tired, have a fever and exhibit a complete loss of appetite, not to mention fear of water.

Re:If you think they've been doing that "lately",

[jericho4.0]

"It is sheer affectation to lacerate a man with the poisonous fragment of a bursting shell and to boggle at making his eyes water by means of lachrymatory gas. I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes. The moral effect should be so good that the loss of life should be reduced to a minimum. It is not necessary to use only the most deadly gasses: gasses can be used which cause great inconvenience and would spread a lively terror and yet would leave no serious permanent effects on most of those affected."

lachrymatory gas = tear gas.

Just so ya know...

Re:If you think they've been doing that "lately",

[Lars T.]

lachrymatory gas = Mustard Gas in that perticular case. Which is only lethal if used by Saddam Hussein against the same enemies.

ALAC on linux, finally

[KingOfTheNerds]

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.

Re:ALAC on linux, finally

[Anonymous Coward]

"claiming that it is more complex"

What a bunch of clowns you must have to work with. I'm sure the Slashdot crowd here sympathizes with you.

The goofs you work with must really only be concerned with getting their jobs done as quickly and efficiently as possible with OS X.

Re:ALAC on linux, finally

[znu]

ALAC can be encoded or decoded in any application that uses QuickTime, which means pretty much any media application on the Mac. That makes it a very useful format for moving lossless data around.

There is a FLAC plug-in for QuickTime, but I think it only does decoding so far.

Re:ALAC on linux, finally

[julie-h]

Your studio should go to his website and make a donation for his great work.

He would very much like that=)

Re:But is it better?

[mrchaotica]

ALAC is different. Apple needed it because FLAC is too good -- it takes too much time/CPU power to encode. I think they would have used FLAC if they could have, but it's too heavy to work in the (original) iPod and the Airport Express.

Re:Let us rejoice!

[X0563511]

Certainly never sounds like it.

Wow

[alexwcovington]

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...

Illegal codecs

[Anonymous Coward]

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)...

Re:Illegal codecs

[SnowZero]

Go ahead and name the patents and copyrights that have been violated. That's right, you can't...

The windows binary codecs were put up by their authors to download for free. If they let me have it for free, their's no copyright violated, and there's nothing stopping me from subsequently running it in the OS of my choice. But just in case someone starts trying to wield the POS DMCA, mplayer is conveniently based in Hungary.

P.S. Real is natively supported by Linux, and needs no windows binary decoder. Only MS and Apple are trying to leverage format lockin into OS lockin.

Re:Illegal codecs

[Anonymous Coward]

Go ahead and name the patents and copyrights that have been violated

+ Patents on MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 audio and video
+ MP3 patents
+ Micrsoft WMV patents
+ Micrsoft codec bundle, warez download from the mplayer site
+ Real codec bundle, warez download from the mplayer site
+ Apple codec bundle ...

Not so hard.

Gstreamer + iTMS

[Goalie_Ca]

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.

Feeding the troll [interesting]

[nietsch]

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?

From TFSite

[Metteyya]

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.

Re:From TFSite

[cbrocious]

Actually, that was a mistake on my behalf... well, it certainly feels like it's been long enough to hit version 1.0!

Nice.

[theparanoidcynic]

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.

How long before...

[Foolomon]

...they combine the two formats to get the AFLAC format. "It's the format with additional benefits!"

Re:How long before...

[Tumbleweed]

And then the .QT format could stand for QuackTime!

Re:But is it better?

[fozzmeister]

surely the iPod and Airport only decode.

Why they use their own format.

[stephenisu]

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.

Re:Why they use their own format.

[Ziviyr]

While FLAC is great, Apple has no controll over what direction FLAC takes.

And we know Apple will have a fit if FLAC takes a turn towards being steadily maintained!

Re:Why they use their own format.

[koekepeer]

it's open source. they can fork it.

http://flac.sourceforge.net/license.html

libs under some variant of BSD, the rest under GPL

Re:Why they use their own format.

[stephenisu]

Sure they can fork it. However, end users might be a little confused as to why this FLAC file works with their iPod, and the others don't. Forking is a Good Thing(TM) in some cases. When I need a specialized version of some business critical app, built to my exact specs, that is maintained by a (hopefully) well trained staff, a fork is probably an appropriate solution.

And yes I understand that Apple can just encapsulate the files in the usual way to fix the whole end-user confusion thing, but the CODEC used by apple has somewhat differing goals than the FLAC CODEC.
FLAC has little to worry about when it comes to efficiency. While it has to use a reasonable amount of resources, the iPod has some much tighter limitations. While FLAC compression schemas may improve overall compression at the higher cost of CPU usage during decoding, Apple doesn't have that option in order to maintain backwards compatability. It's honestly just easier to maintain a CODEC of their own and leave it be.

Dude

[Anonymous Coward]

The Airport Express is a router. I don't think it has an Athlon 900

Re:Dude

[crazney]

It's the Athlon 900 that will be doing the encoding (the hard bit). The AEX will be doing the decoding (the easy bit).

Re:Great applications with high quality audio

[jbn-o]

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.

Re:Let us rejoice!

[znu]

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.

Doesn't really compare

[mcc]

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.

Re:Doesn't really compare

[gl4ss]

*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.*

you could have said the exact same thing about atrac3 as there weren't any music available in it except music that you ripped yourself(is there still?). so saying that they won't ever use ALAC for distribution they might want to keep their own finger on is a stretch. it's entirely possible.

though, apple would more probably just take whatever format is out there and bake their own drm over it they have done now(in some uses with alac as well).

Re:Doesn't really compare

[mcc]

you could have said the exact same thing about atrac3 as there weren't any music available in it except music that you ripped yourself

Inaccurate

Re:Doesn't really compare

[d34thm0nk3y]

They are probably positioning themselves to be able to sell lossless encodings through itunes. Once they are selling these expect the output mp3 feature to disappear.

Re:Doesn't really compare

[mcc]

They are probably positioning themselves to be able to sell lossless encodings through itunes

I seriously doubt this. Apple seems to be approaching the iTunes Music Store with an obsessive look to minimizing their disc and bandwidth usage. If not they'd likely be encoding at 160 kbps or something instead of their current 128 kbps, so as to quiet down the people who don't understand kbps is not a measure of sound quality. :)

I've seen ALAC's space usage described as "a little more than half" of uncompressed audio. This would mean that transmitting a single song as ALAC would take up I would estimate about as many resources as an entire album of AAC to store and transmit. Given the incredible bulk that the iTunes Music Store operates in, this would be sort of problematic. In the absence of widespread demand for such a thing Apple almost certainly won't bother.

Once they are selling these expect the output mp3 feature to disappear.

How so? They sell AACs now, and I can right click AAC files and get a "convert to mp3" option.

The way it works is that you set a preferred "import" format in your preferences, and a right click "convert to" option for that format appears and works on every item in your iTunes library not purchased from the iTunes Music Store. So if Apple sold ALACs yeah sure you wouldn't be able to convert those specific ALACs, but this is not related to ALAC itself.

Re:Let us rejoice!

[EggyToast]

The problem is that most people experience quicktime on Windows, where it tries to take over your media file associations, embed itself in your web browser, and generally bug you during use with its non-standard interface (for Windows, that is).

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.

Honest answer

[mcc]

Nah. "Proprietary format" just means "the real world doesn't know how to decode it yet". There isn't some inherent right for proprietary formats to remain proprietary.

There are only a handful of ways a proprietary format can remain proprietary:

1. License agreements. This is the most common one, and almost certainly Apple is using this one. The idea is that if you give someone a document describing how your formats work you say "if you don't agree to use this information only in certain ways you can't have it", or if you give someone a decoder for the format you say "if you don't agree not to take apart this decoder and see how it works you can't have it". I'd guess the iTunes clickthrough agreement says something like the latter. But this is sort of the entire idea of cleanroom reverse engineering; license agreements like those on iTunes really are no hindrance whatsoever to a reverse engineer, so long as they choose to do that reverse engineering in a way that doesn't violate the license agreement. And that's not really that hard. Pretty much just don't use a disassembler and you're fine.
2. Patents. I'm pretty sure this one really doesn't work. As far as I am aware-- I can't find an explicit cite for this in a brief google search, maybe someone else can give us one-- reverse engineered implementations created for purposes of compatibility can provide protection against patent claims. Since "formats" and "compatibility" are almost the same word, this makes it often implausible to use patents as a block on unauthorized use or interpretation of a format, such as an audio codec or a video game API. Apple probably has some sort of patent on ALAC-- like all research-oriented commercial software developers, they patent absolutely everything they do-- but I've never known Apple to use patents in this exact fashion and as far as I can tell their success would be incredibly questionable even if they tried. I'd ask the guy who reverse engineered the decoder to look through apple's entries in the USPTO database to see if he can find anything that might refer to ALAC, but he really shouldn't, since hilariously you're safer from patent damage claims if you culture a state of blissful ignorance as to what patents exist out there.
3. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This one is scary, as it grants powers which are essentially stronger than copyrights or patents to anyone who can construe what they do as involving in some way "DRM". The DMCA seems to assert that "mechanisms which effectively control access to a copyrighted work" have some sort of inherent right to remain unbroken. This seems to imply people with proprietary formats do have a right to keep them proprietary so long as they can pretend there's "DRM" in it. However there's a few problems here. It has been questioned whether the nature and implementation of the law is enforceable against a serious challenge, and some uses of the law-- for example putting some kind of "DRM" in a printer cartridge and then using the DMCA to shut down anyone who makes compatible printer cartridges-- have already been smacked down by the courts. Apple has already used the DMCA to keep down software which removes the "DRM" from iTunes Music Store purchases, though the best they can do is force that software to use hosting providers outside the U.S.. But, well, even though the law is wrong, that's actually sort of exactly what the letter and intent of the law are intended to do-- protect things like Fairplay. But attacking unauthorized use of ALAC would follow neither. Attempting to claim ALAC is covered by the DMCA is simply laughable; as has been observed elsewhere in this discussion, it is not and does not contain "DRM" and it provides no limitations on the flow of copyrighted material whatsoever.
4. Technical barriers. The idea here is, as Microsoft does with SMB or Word, you design your format in such a way as to naturally resist reverse engineering. This is sort of a moot point with ALAC. The decoder's alre

Re:Honest answer

[xgamer04]

Actually, SMB was originally a standard, but MS decided to "embrace" it, and we all know how that goes.

Also, I don't really understand what you mean by saying that once something is decodeable it is an open standard. If this were the case, no one would've been sued over the DeCSS stuff.

Re:Honest answer

[mcc]

Also, I don't really understand what you mean by saying that once something is decodeable it is an open standard

I am confused-- what are you referring to? I suspect either you misunderstood something I said or I was unclear.

Re:Honest answer

[xgamer04]

I guess I was kind of confused about you saying

"Proprietary format" just means "the real world doesn't know how to decode it yet".

Then I (unclearly) was trying to point out that patented and trade-secreted stuff does get sued over when someone reverse-engineers things (example: the DVD encryption scheme)

Re:Honest answer

[mcc]

Ah. Well, I wouldn't exactly say that something must be exactly one of "proprietary" and "open". I'm just saying, you can lose control of a proprietary format :)

I do note in my post above that the DMCA-- which is the only thing blocking unauthorized use of the DVD forum's formats-- is an exception to what I have said. But the DMCA doesn't apply all the time, and as the Lexmark case shows, the cases where it applies are starting to get smaller as judges start actually reading the thing...

Overloading "QuickTime codecs"

[tepples]

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.

KAAAAAHHHNNN!

[John Fulmer]

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.

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 .m4a (aac) file so something iTunes can handle.

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!

Re:KAAAAAHHHNNN!

[2nd Post!]

I don't understand your first point at all.

I've always been able to 'stream' my iTunes library from my desktop to my laptop; is it that your wife's computer doesn't have iTunes?

Re:KAAAAAHHHNNN!

[John Fulmer]

Whoops. That should have 'ogg' in there somewhere....

Re:KAAAAAHHHNNN!

[HeelToe]

I installed audiofile through fink which includes sfconvert - I use it to conver the aiff big-endian format to wav, then I flac the wav. It doesn't work as a stream, though, which is somewhat annoying.

Are you submitting patches back to the flac project for support of the aiff files?

Why not stream the music off your server in another format? I actually maintain a 160Kbit/s ABR lame mirror of my flac repository through some scripting. I just use those over filesharing. You could also just setup a streaming server that converts flac to mp3 in realtime.

I'd like to see your scripts if you feel like posting them.

Re:KAAAAAHHHNNN!

[John Fulmer]

The flac maintainer has my patches, and hopefully a much better version of my AIFF support patch will make it into one of the next versions of FLAC. It was really a trivial hack to get it to work, once I knew what I was looking for.

And I decided to use AAC/MP4 just to see if I could. i could have just as easily modified my scripts to use LAME instead. I guess I just like to make things hard.

My scripts are definately in the 'works for me' category. Maybe someday I'll put some work into them, make them do something interesting, and then put them up somewhere. For now, they're nothing special.

jf

Apple Lossless a competitor to FLAC?

[amokk]

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.

Re:Apple Lossless a competitor to FLAC?

[808140]

I don't think so. The truth is, most people who play music on their computer don't know the difference between lossless and lossy, and usually still don't get it very well even after you try to explain it to them. To them, music is mp3, although they may be vaguely aware of other formats such as wma and perhaps (if they own an iPod) AAC.

The people who use lossless encoding and understand what it is and what its benefits are are a much more technical crowd.

So while the Mac fanatics will of course use Apple Lossless because it's produced by Apple, many other people already have most of their CD collection encoded in FLAC and are probably happy with FLAC's less (not?) patent-encumbered, open source nature.

You know, open formats and all that.

I personally wouldn't even consider Apple Lossless. FLAC is an open, documented format with encoders and decoders that work on every platform imagineable. Not only that, but FLAC is a very competitive format, being as good or better on average than essentially any other lossless format out there for most samples.

Simply put, FLAC is a well known and trusted brand among people that know about lossless audio compression, why it's good, and why they should use it. Apple lossless is some other proprietary format that might (due to patents, for example) eventually require a license to be able to legally decode.

And I think I speak for most people that have already encoded hundreds of CDs losslessly for convenience and storage when I say, thanks, but no thanks.

Free Software for me.

Re:Apple Lossless a competitor to FLAC?

[blackdragon7777]

The 'Mac fanatics' will indeed use Apple lossless but for a very different reason than you provide. The reason that they will use it is that it takes no time to use or setup. The only setup is to go to iTunes preferences and selected it in a drop down box. I don't even want to think of the setup that would have to be done to get flac installed and able to rip in iTunes if that's even possible. I'm not going to use another program just to rip a cd when iTunes does it quickly and easily. Why waste my time when what I have works already.

Not only that but iTunes runs on all of the platforms I use and it allows me to stream music from my desktop to my laptop if I so wish to do so.

Re:Apple Lossless a competitor to FLAC?

[808140]

All good arguments, I'll admit. For the record, I'm not against your position, if that's how you feel. But one thing you should consider is future-proofing.

It's true that using ALAC is a lot simpler if you use iTunes all the time. But the whole idea behind a lossless format is that you can rip all your CDs and be able to re-encode them easily in whatever the format-du-jour is, and not have to worry about stuff like your CDs falling apart, getting scratched, etc.

When you have a format with that much staying power -- I mean, one you might want to open again in 40 years time -- do you really want to trust a company with that data? It's not even that Apple is evil, per se, just that in 40 years, iTunes may no longer be available, and because its format is undocumented, you have a bunch of big files with valuable data in them that you can't access anymore. It's like people who realize, with frustration, that no software on the market today can open Word documents they created in the early 80s. Sort of sucks if you're a writer.

Now, we have an OSS decoder. It will probably always be around, but it might be illegal to use, depending on how Apple/the MPEG consortium wants to enforce its patents. Furthermore, given that it was reverse engineered instead of written from an open spec, who knows whether there aren't places where it doesn't work properly?

Plus, ALAC will likely evolve, but always be called ALAC. So perhaps the OSS decoder available now works on today's files, but will it work on tomorrow's? Hard to tell. As long as you have iTunes, well, you're in good shape. But what if iTunes doesn't exist in 20 years? Lots of other Apple products are no longer around. It wouldn't be the first. iPod is on top today, but will it be tomorrow? After all, MS started out writing software for Apple computers... think about that.

The nice thing about Free Software is that, for better or for worse, you'll always have it, because it is free (by which I mean unencumbered by IP restrictions that might prevent you from accessing your own data down the road). You can have whatever viewpoint you want about OSS operating systems, word processors, and the like, but think long and hard about committing data you care about to a proprietary format.

You would not be the first to find that in a decade or two, nothing will open it (legally).

Plus, from what I've read, FLAC works better than ALAC. There are QT plugins for it, too... so you can use it with iTunes, after a one-time install. More hassle, yes. But piece of mind is worth it, or should be.

Think about it.

That doesn't make any sense.

[Ayanami Rei]

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.

Re:Let us rejoice!

[Lars T.]

The problem is that most people experience quicktime on Windows, where it tries to take over your media file associations, embed itself in your web browser, and generally bug you during use with its non-standard interface (for Windows, that is).

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?

Re:Great applications with high quality audio

[yuggoth]

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.

http://damien.drix.free.fr/qtflac/

Re:ALAC = .m4a

[Wesley Felter]

An M4A file can contain either AAC or ALAC. But they are still totally different codecs; software that plays AAC/M4A will not necessarily play ALAC/M4A.

Re:But is it better?

[groomed]

This must be the latest confaddled confabulation floating around on the Mac forums. You can always tell, because while they feign some concern for cold hard technical facts, they provide no data to back it up, and are sufficiently vague as to be meaningless. This latest fable, for example, ignores the fact that MP3 takes more resources to decode than FLAC, yet the iPod and Airport Express have no problem decoding MP3.

There's undoubtedly a perfectly valid reason why Apple doesn't support FLAC, but this isn't one of them.

Re:Great applications with high quality audio

[Comsn]

there are more mp3 tools than ogg vorbis tools. i converted all of my vinyl (about 480 albums) to ogg however.

vinyl>wav>depop>wav>ogg

there arent many files using ALAC, but there are some, at least this should be supported by mplayer soon :)

Re:Let us rejoice!

[jschottm]

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.

AirTunes.

[Yaztromo]

Why bother with reverse engineering ALAC? So far, I have seen / read mention of only one major useful thing that has been learned: ALAC uses adaptive compression algorithms.

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.

Re:AirTunes.

[Ohreally_factor]

You might want to look into Air Foil. It allows you to stream any audio to AP Express.

It's OS X only at this point, unfortunately for users of other OSes.

Re:AirTunes.

[clarkcox3]

It's OS X only at this point, unfortunately for users of other OSes.

Duh, you just named the main reason why this reverse-engineering is useful.

Re:But is it better?

[nolife]

FLAC is too good -- it takes too much time/CPU power to encode.

Not quite according to this post. Do you have any references that say otherwise? I've never used ALAC myself so I can not comment.

FLAC quicktime plugin

[Qwerpafw]

I posted a simple guide on Mac Update to using the Quicktime FLAC plugin. I'm working on an Applescript to simplify the process of batch converting FLAC files into various AAC/MP4 files (without QTpro or iTunes) and still preserve the tag information, but I haven't quite ironed out the kinks (it crashes with some tag info, for some reason).

Go to MacUpdate to download the plugin if you don't have it.

(1) Once you've downloaded and uncompressed the file, you'll see two items in the plugin folder. One is a copy of the open source license, and the other is the FLAC_Decoder.component quicktime plugin.

(2) Move the FLAC_Decoder.component file into

/Library/Quicktime or if you don't have root access ~/Library/Quicktime

if you don't have either of these folders, feel free to create them, either with the Finder (Command-Shift-N) or with Terminal (mkdir /Library/Quicktime)

(3) Restart Quicktime if it's open--otherwise, open Quicktime (if you've deleted the link in your Dock, look in the /Applications folder).

(4) Find a .flac file that you want to open--it should have no icon. Make sure it ends in the .flac extension--this will be important later. Using the Finder, select the file by left clicking on the file icon, and hit Apple-I (or select "Get Info" from the File menu).

(5) In the file's info window, you'll see the heading "Open With:" Click the triangle next to the heading, and pull down the "Open With:" menu--select "Other..." from the "Open With:" menu.

(6) You should now see a dialog box asking you to choose an application to open the unknown.flac file with--from the "Enable" menu, choose "All Applications" (the default setting is "Recommended Applications"). Navigate to /Applications and select Quicktime Player. If you didn't change the enabled applications to "All," then Quicktime Player will be grayed out and you will not be able to select it.

(7) Once you've successfully changed the file binding so that it opens with Quicktime Player, go back to the Info menu on your .flac file. Under "Open With:" you should now see "Quicktime Player" as the selected choice. If this is not the case, retreat to Step 6 and try again. Otherwise, click on "Change All..." to instruct your computer to "Use this Application to open all documents like this." There should be a brief pause, and a dialog box box will appear asking you if you really want to open all your .flac files with Quicktime Player. Click continue at the dialog.

(8) You now have installed the FLAC component and successfully bound quicktime to the .flac file extension. If you own Quicktime Pro, you can also convert and export .flac files into other formats.

(9) You can play the flac files in iTunes if you rename them to .mov and drop them on the iTunes icon. You should be able to convert them to mp3/aac via iTunes. Most of iTunes' functions, however, won't work... and it will hog CPU and memory. I'd recommend converting them via quicktime or a similar application.

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.

Re:FLAC quicktime plugin

[John Fulmer]

Which would be great....if it worked for me. Which it doesn't. I read the bit on MacUpdate when I started this whole process, and Quicktime will not recognize .flac files as a valid format.

I've read reports where the quicktime component works and where it doesn't. It seems a bit spotty.

Ah well.

Official MPEG-4 lossless codec?

[bitpart]

When's the official MPEG-4 lossless codec supposed to come out?

Re:Official MPEG-4 lossless codec?

[fredan]

At the same time as Duke Nukem forever will be released?

He's from Australia

[synthespian]

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.

Re:He's from Australia

[nadadogg]

Yeah, the source code's probably too much to fit on a tshirt like decss.

Re:But is it better?

[mrchaotica]

But the computer running iTunes has to decode whatever $CODEC into uncompressed audio, and then encode into FLAC in realtime to send it to the Airport Express. Can every supported Mac -- including old G3s -- do that?

Re:But is it better?

[mrchaotica]

Nope, I stand corrected. Sorry 'bout that!

Re:Let us rejoice!

[znu]

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).

When will I be able to play this:

[The MESMERIC]

xine or
mplayer --playlist
http://movies.apple.com/trailers/touch stone/hitchh ikersguidetothegalaxy/images/hh_large_03.mov

in Linux ?

Apple - PLEASE Port these missing QT codecs.

Re:ripping in OSX?

[John Fulmer]

Except now I have a system that rips the CD (yes, by copying from the OSX cd filesystem, which is EXACTLY how iTunes does it, BTW), converts it to flac (with track info) for archival, and then batch converts everything to aac, all nicely scripted out.

Lots of work upfront, but I have a very efficient ripping system now, with long term, lossless archival.

And all so I was guarenteed not to be locked into a semi-proprietary format.

I love my Apple, but Apple the company could do some things better, IMHO.

jf

Re:Great applications with high quality audio

[bbc]

"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."

Unless you encode at ridiculously low quality, for 99% of the people and for 99% of the tracks, MP3, AAC and Ogg Vorbis files sound exactly like the original too. They were designed to do that.

FLAC is useful if you expect to do things with your tracks down the road.

"Thanks steve!!"

Did your mother not teach you never to speak with your mouth full?

Re:Great applications with high quality audio

[rochrist]

Good lord! If you contend that MP3s sound like remotely like the original, you've got to be hard of hearing. MP3 is ok as an efficient compression scheme, but as a high fidelity experience, it is sadly lacking.

Not especially

[FredFnord]

It's not particularly difficult.

And there's a lot of sample code, including a complete implementation of an audio codec (uLaw), here:

http://developer.apple.com/samplecode/QuickTime/ id xQuickTimeComponentCreation-date.html

Take it away.

-fred

Drives me nuts

[FredFnord]

Want to write a QuickTime audio codec? Go here:

http://developer.apple.com/samplecode/QuickTime/ id xQuickTimeComponentCreation-date.html

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