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Opensource Apple Lossless Decoder Released
Cody Brocious writes "David Hammerton has released version 1.0 of an ALAC decoder. This allows users of operating systems not supported by iTunes/QuickTime to listen to their Apple Lossless files, a proprietary competitor to FLAC. This is a large leap forward in audio codec interoperability, and paves the way for an ALAC encoder." The site also asks for additional help on the project.
...but I just don't see why Apple felt it was necessary to make another lossless format. While Apple in the past has been accused of often suffering from NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrome, it seemed like they were improving in this area: the iMac helped popularize USB, the open-source core of OS X has its roots in BSD, iTunes supports MP3s, their web browser gives source back to Konquerer, etc. Anyone have any theories as to why they didn't just use FLAC? After all, the work was already done for them...
Save the galaxy!
Will he get sued? Proprietary format... Apple... Lawsuits...
Also, considering that "Apple never released any documents on the format", its incredible that this guy wrote a decoder. Some people are truly amazing sometimes...
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This initial release is version is 0.1, not 1.0
gif-like, could i use it in a real project?
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As I understand it, all the wireless Airport express streams use apple lossless codecs. How long before we can have a program to intercept these wireless music streams and then convert to mp3s or whatever you want? Pretty crappy way of getting music, slow etc the more I think about it, but why not?
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If you had used Windows or a Mac, or had used someone else's Mac, then you would need this encoder. The guys who helped make this encoder spent months working on this project, and continue to work on it. This might help push more people to use linux (to switch) and have more univeral applications.
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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
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
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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.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
We used ALAC all the time at the studio where I worked, but alas, some of our software was linux only and would not compile under OS X. This was very frustrating and required multiple computers. Finally with this system we can move over to this software as a solution. I love linux and would rather use it, but of the people I work with don't want to learn it claiming that it is more complex. Anyway, thats great that we can do the job with ALAC decoder! I'm sure other studios forced to use ALAC will be very happy with all of this.
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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.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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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.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
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.
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Not yet. There are people working to integrate it into ffmpeg/libavcodec... from there it should work in MPlayer at least.
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...they combine the two formats to get the AFLAC format. "It's the format with additional benefits!"
When you have many embedded devices to program for, it is convenient to have control over the future of the CODEC you are using.
While FLAC is great, Apple has no controll over what direction FLAC takes.
Sigs? We don't need no stinking sigs!
The Airport Express is a router. I don't think it has an Athlon 900
Sounds to me like a justification to make and distribute a free software FLAC QuickTime plugin so our friends burdened with the proprietary QuickTime implementation Apple distributes can play streaming FLAC data or play FLAC files.
I see no technical justification of Apple's Lossless format that convinces me it is superior to FLAC (of course, since Apple's Lossless format is only available in proprietary software, it will always lose for those that care about software freedom). Yet I'm sure people will use it and encourage others to use it because it is distributed with their proprietary software. In this way, it reminds me of the odd stance some people take with Ogg Vorbis versus MP3--they know that the Vorbis codec has performed at least as well as MP3 in many listening tests, they acknowledge that Ogg is a better encapsulation format (allowing for more expressive tags, for instance), and they insist on using "the best tool for the job". But they cave in to popular pressure to conform to using a lesser "tool" and endorse the continued use of MP3, sometimes even exclusively (which is really silly).
I hope nobody interprets what I'm writing as though this takes away from this new BSD-licensed Apple Lossless decoder. I'm grateful for what has been done here--it was needed and it is a great contribution to the free software community. I think there's a great future for it at archive.org in case anyone submits audio encoded with Apple's Lossless codec. This could allow archive.org to decode that and re-encode it with something else (many archive.org recordings are encoded many ways). However, when I distribute losslessly encoded copies of audio, I'll continue to dismiss Apple's Lossless codec out of hand and prefer FLAC. I help manage the website for a locally-produced talk radio show called "News from Neptune" and there you can find copies of the show encoded in FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, and Speex. FLAC serves our needs excellently.
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I get so tired of people misunderstanding QuickTime.
QuickTime is not a codec. It's a media architecture. The MOV file format can theoretically embed arbitrary numbers of tracks (of audio, video, 3D, animated sprites, vector graphics) in any format, and QuickTime supports several dozen formats of various sorts out of the box. ALAC, like every other codec Apple implements on OS X, is just a QuickTime plugin.
Not much of the QuickTime content you find around the web uses it, though, so I don't see how this is going to help QuickTime movie playback on Linux much. But Apple is really pushing MPEG-4 these days, so if Linux has a good MPEG-4 implementation, compatibility problems should go away eventually.
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Sony freaks out on their formats because they actually have some kind of power they can gain from those formats. They have an agenda. For example they wanted to turn ATRAC or Minidisc or whatever into a distribution format, one that other people used but that they controlled. They wanted to supplant mp3 and then leverage this to pressure people into using other Sony products. They wanted to control distribution.
But ALAC isn't even intended or positioned for distribution. There's no power in it. ALACs are created in iTunes and ripped from CDs you own, and they're intended to be played back in iTunes and copied to your own personal iPod. Going through the particularly obvious or convenient interface paths in iTunes, there's no reason that once someone creates an ALAC file that ALAC would ever pass into the possession of anyone except them. Apple seems to be almost resisting the idea people could start distributing ALACs the way people distribute FLACs now. So now Apple controls... what? The way iTunes users use iTunes? They had that already, they wrote the thing.
I guess you can say ALAC locks people into iTunes since once they've ripped their collection to ALAC they can't use those ALACs in other programs but... well, no, not really, becuase ALACs are lossless-- that's what they are! So you can just tell iTunes to convert them to mp3s with no degradation or ill effects whatsoever, by simply right clicking on them. Bang, lock-in gone. And the lossy, transcoding-error-prone format Apple's pushing... is an open MPEG format, AAC. If Apple wanted power or to lock people in, they'd be pushing people to rip their iTunes libraries as some WMP-like proprietary lossy format, not pushing people to rip to AAC and then offering their proprietary ALAC as a minor option buried in the iTunes preferences.
Personally I would suspect they used ALAC rather than FLAC simply because they already had the ALAC code internally developed and their engineers were familiar with it. I doubt anywhere near as much thought went into the decision as people seem to be assuming.
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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.
There are only a handful of ways a proprietary format can remain proprietary:
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Hmph. I moved to a Mac mini a few weeks ago, and decided that I would finish up ripping all my CD's. Up to then, they had all been ripped as flac, and I was converting from flac -> ogg as necessary.
.m4a (aac) file so something iTunes can handle.
Now, with iTunes on my main PC and my wife's laptop, i thought 'Wouldn't it be great if we could use a daap server and stream all our music?' So, I thought I would use iTunes to rip the rest of my cd's, and maybe convert my current flac files to ALAC. Then I could convert to ogg, and SURELY i could stream those.
That's when the drums of doom started playing.
First, I found that iTunes couldn't handle streaming off files. The Quicktime ogg plugin works okay for playing off the local hard drive, but no nice streaming from my daap server.
No problem, I'll convert to AAC and stream those.
(The drums started playing louder)
Then, I found there is no way to really get iTunes to play or convert FLAC files. There's a plugin, but I can't for the life of me get it to work. And , I found there was no ALAC -> anything, so I ran the risk of being locked into a format that was non portable.
No problem, I'll just find an opensource ripper to convert to FLAC, the to AAC.
(The drums started playing MUCH louder)
I started using 'abcde', a rather nifty shell script that rips and converts cd's to any of a number of formats, including FLAC. It even uses Freecddb for the track information.
But... On OSX, the only real way to easily rip CD tracks is to copy the AIFF files that OSX presents to you when it mounts the audio CD.
And FLAC does NOT like the particilar AIFF files OSX presents.
(The drums are deafening)
24 hours, a bunch of research and hacking on FLAC, I make a custom flac binaries that can handle the AIFF files. And there's the opensource 'faac' program that can convert the flac files to AAC.
Except.... the AAC files faac creates can't be streamed or played by iTunes. Something about the MP4 headers faac generates aren't compatable.
(THE DRUMS ARE IN MY HEAD!)
Another 24 hours of researching, and I come up with the MPEG4IP project at Cisco, which has a nifty little program called 'mp4creator', which is designed to create or modify mp4 files. It has an '--optimize' function which modifies the headers of an existing
I threw everything into a script, and now I can rip files on my Mac mini, store them as FLAC, and then convert and play them as AAC/M4a files via iTunes.
But Apple could have made things MUCH easier by making iTunes more open to other codecs or providing more information for others to creat iTunes codecs.
And now I find someone has written an ALAC converter, so I could have used the ALAC format to being with.
well THANK YOU. THANK YOU SO BLOODY MUCH!
Lossless is part of iTunes and therefore part of Windows and Mac versions of iTunes (and probably quicktime)
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
Go to MacUpdate to download the plugin if you don't have it.
It's also worth noting that if you convert the FLAC files into WMA lossless, iTunes will convert them automatically for you into ALAC (apple lossess) and preserve tag information.
He's from Australia, and IIRC reverse-engineering laws are different there. I'm not so sure Apple can sue. But, hey, maybe he shouldn't fly to the States, where - hmm - Freedom Abounds (copyright by George Walker Bush) - remember Dimitri?.
Furthermore, he's made it very clear that Apple used a lot of things that had been published before.
I don't know much about the Australian law, though, pointers are appreciated.
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
Well, it doesn't blow away MPEG-4, because it's part of MPEG-4. H.264 is MPEG-4 Part 10. The codec implemented in QuickTime now that people refer to as MPEG-4 is actually MPEG-4 Part 2. MPEG-4 is a big standard.
H.264 is also one of the required codecs (and will probably be the preferred codec) for both rival high-def DVD standards. It's an amazing codec; it really does deliver amazing quality all the way from cell phone streams up through broadcast quality video (at bit rates that residential broadband connections can handle), up to 1080p high-definition (at bit rates similar to what MPEG-4 achieves with standard definition video).
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At the same time as Duke Nukem forever will be released?