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Apple's Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) Now Open Source
Revotron writes "Apple has released the full source to their Apple Lossless Audio Codec under the Apache license. ALAC was developed by Apple and deployed on all of its platforms and devices over the last 10 years. Could the release of the ALAC source code mark a possible first step in opening up more of the iOS platform?"
...just use FLAC?
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
but it's still cool nonetheless.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Am I correct that FLAC is not supported by the iPod, but ALAC is? If we're free to convert between the two now, what advantage is there in using FLAC instead of ALAC?
now it's FALAC, which sounds a bit phallic.
Apple has a lot of patents on audio/video compression. Have they licensed those for free for this implementation? How about another implementation or fork? Will those have the same license?
Phase 1: DRM-laden, 128Kbps music. Phase 2: DRM-free, 256kbps music. Phase 3: lossless music. But the RIAA is scared of Apple, so they insisted on a non-proprietary lossless format.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Keep in mind any Airplay compatible device can use ALAC, but can't use FLAC. This includes the Airport Express units that have been out since ~2004 or so, and the newer non Apple devices with Airplay compatibility. This is likely a move to assist with 3rd parties wanting to integrate more with Airplay, as the relevant network pieces (Bonjour) are already out there in source form.
Sadly I'm sure most people here will go on and on about how it's not FLAC, and whatever. For once, just at least appreciate that Apple is continuing to throw some interesting things out to the OSS crowd instead of deciding to nitpick it to death. If you don't want to use it, thats fine. Just really tired of the nitpickery and general negative outlook geeks around here tend to have. Cheer up for once :-)
They released the code under the Apache license, which includes a patent license in section 3.
In other news the Alphabet song goes "ABCD..".and sings out the Alphabet.
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
Apache license clause 3, coward.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
yet another dick-move-in-sheeps-clothing by apple.
Yet another? One wonders if you're reading Slashdot on a WebKit-based browser. Apple's been a pretty prolific open source contributor.
E pluribus unum
Only because they HAD to. They made Webkit from opensource Konqueror (KDE) code which ran on POSIX, to use in their new POSIX style OS. Apple uses Webkit in everything on Mac OS X+.
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
I cannot tell 256kbps VBR MP3 from lossless on my stereo. I listen mainly to classical music.
They could have developed their own engine instead. You are working hard to split hairs, and basing it entirely on speculation.
What is speculative about a fact that they used code that was already licensed as open-source and so they had to release source? Developing your own engine is much harder, just like developing your own OS layer is harder when BSD is sitting there all ready with the basics. Even harder than splitting hairs.
Oh, it was a smart move to do that, I agree. Just like taking the mouse idea from Xerox was. I am reluctant to associate any benevolence or credit though
.
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
If you're a non-audiphile trying to learn how to detect the difference with your ears, I suggest this:
Rip a CD into ALAC. Then re-rip one of the tracks into 256k mp3. Open each track side-by-side in music player apps and set the volume the same. Play each version 10 seconds at a time, paying attention to the perceived location of each instrument in the room.
You may find that it is easier to perceive that location while listening to the ALAC track.
I won't bore you with the scientific details. GIYF.
This codec is massively popular as a consequence of Apple's market share in this space. Sure it's been reverse engineered, but now that they're going open with it, a lot more hardware and software will be able to bake in native support for this Apple format without worry of compatibility or legal problems. This is a big win for file format ubiquity and, frankly, should finally settle the FLAC vs. Apple debate. There isn't a very good reason to use FLAC anymore now that ALAC is open source.
For once I applaud Apple.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
is because you [I'm guessing] are 23 years old and you aren't happy with your life. You want to belong to a club and you want a villain; the club you've chosen is "righteously indignant nerd" and predictably you've chosen Apple as your bad guy.
MCA you are totally free to use it, but if you do we will sue you!
Apple is a company whom as patented glossy black, rounded rectangles, sliders on a touch screen and even as far back as the original mac, drop down menus. I don't give a fuck if they mailed me a sausage and cheese basket with a 100$ bill tied into a bow on top along with the source code, I wouldn't trust them further than I can throw my powermac 9600 (which that fucker weights 35 lbs out of the box + all the shit I put into it)
Why, it's the sound of everyone still using MP3s, because no one gives a crap about formats that don't already play on literally everything...
There's a heck of a lot more to an audio codec than what device may or may not support it, or how good its compression is.
Like what? How much battery power one needs to play back or record on a handheld device that supports it? A lossless codec like ALAC or FLAC has no generation loss at all; a lossless codec produces exactly the same samples out that were put in.
Typical Slashdot Apple hater delusion. They were always going to do this anyway, whether Steve Jobs was at the helm or not. Or was Steve Jobs not CEO of Apple when they open sourced Mach and WebKit?
So the answer is no: Apple won't "open up" now that Steve is gone. Apple will continue to do what it does best.
Only because they HAD to. They made Webkit from opensource Konqueror (KDE) code
Open-source LGPLed Konqueror code, that being why they had to.
which ran on POSIX,
Try running it on an OS that implements POSIX and nothing else. :-) Perhaps the non-GUI calls it made were only POSIX calls, but it also made a ton of calls to Qt and KDE, which Apple had to redo.
to use in their new POSIX style OS.
"It runs on POSIXy OSes" probably wasn't a major reason for choosing KHTML; I think most of the open-source rendering engines available at the time ran on Linux etc..
What is speculative about a fact that they used code that was already licensed as open-source and so they had to release source?
"Was already licensed as open-source" wasn't the reason why they had to release source. For example:
Developing your own engine is much harder, just like developing your own OS layer is harder when BSD is sitting there all ready with the basics.
...the BSD license is an free software/open source license but doesn't require you to make source to derived code available. KHTML was licensed under the LGPL, so Apple did have to make source to their derived-from-KHTML WebKit available (but, as it's the LGPL rather than the GPL, didn't have to make source to anything using WebKit available, or require all third-party code that links with WebKit to have its source code available).
Speculative: They *only* released it because they had to.
Fact: They had to release it.
Fact: Apple has benefited greatly by the proliferation of WebKit. No longer is the Mac a second-class citizen of the internet due to not having IE6.
Speculation: I don't think it is unreasonable to believe that they chose to start with an open-source project partly because it saved development time and also partly because using a widely-adopted engine as a basis for the browser is good for Mac users, which is a goal furthered by releasing the engine as open-source. I think if Konqueror didn't exist, or wasn't used as the basis of the project, Apple may have (I'd say 50/50 chance) still released WebKit as open-source. (It is also quite reasonable to argue they didn't care about the open-source part and just wanted to ship quickly - unless the people who made those decisions state them publicly, it is all speculation).
it also made a ton of calls to Qt
Now this gets confusing. Qt is also an abbreviation for the media framework that iTunes uses.
I would say that it's more likely they want to open up the airplay protocol. Encouraging more devices to connect to their devices and enabling airplay on more 3rd party devices.
What? But Apple never give anything back!!!!!!
They didn't have to; they could have chosen not to use KHTML at all. They willingly contributed to LLVM and Clang, open sourced the Darwin layer of their operating system, open sourced CoreFoundation, open sourced launchd, and open sourced libdispatch.
You already trolled about the iPod being "locked down" and were corrected. Now you're bashing Apple again with more karma whoring comments. I guess Slashdot really has become a haven for this sort of thing in recent years.
Yes he opened this format after being in the dirt for nearly a month.
By "taking the mouse idea," you're referring to how several Xerox employees worked on the Mac at Apple, right?
And what about other open source releases like launchd, libdispatch, the Clang compiler, ALAC, and more that they weren't required to release as open source but chose to anyway?
Its got to be better than using vectors to define bitmaps as in pict format
...over my dead body?
Great, does this mean car receivers will FINALLY start supporting a lossless format for once? That way I don't have to waste my money getting an ipod to play lossless songs that bypass the ipod DAC in the receiver and can just use a cheap USB stick instead? My songs are ripped in lossless audio format. Not a lot of options for us folk who like to listen to music primarily in the car only.
Rockbox to the rescue! Unfortunately, many of the newest ipod models aren't supported (lack of developer time/interest/hardware ownership) but if you have a supported model you get support not only for FLAC but also for a whole host of other useful codecs Apple refuses to support.
Many slashdotters heard of Rockbox back in the Archos days and have forgotten about it since then. Rockbox continues to get better, and it's worth another look. I just flashed a Sansa Clip+ the other day and was surprised at what Rockbox had to offer.
I know you're an AC and most likely a troll. But regardless, just in case someone else out there truly believes that Apple would never in any way deal with open source software. Never mind their contributions to LLVM and other projects.
No, Apple are evil and for the sheeple. And if we're going the "XBox-fan route" we might as well claim Microsoft are much more open and the Good Guys(tm) because they're so open and only use established industry standards like SMB, BMP, MSNP and OOXML while Apple uses horrible proprietary Apple-only technology like NFS, PNG, XMPP and PDF...
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Read it carefully, remembering that the "Contributor" is Apple, and that the "You" is you, the party to whom Apple is licensing the software and offering the patent grant.
It says that if YOU institute patent litigation alleging that Apple's licensed code infringes some patent, then YOU lose the patent grant offered to you by Apple. On losing the patent grant, naturally you become liable to Apple for patent royalties if you ever used or are using this code.
This is no kind offering by Apple. It gives them the power to leave you penniless through punitive damages, court fees and lawyer expenses if you raise a patent suit against them.
Lossless audio compression is pretty brain-dead simple. If you think of how sticking a wav file in a .zip or .gz only saves about 10% of space, (give or take,) the most basic lossless codecs work by essentially zipping the mathematical difference between each sample. Because storing the difference between each sample, instead of the sample itself, is more likely to have repetition in audio; algorithms like .zip and .gz can then be applied.
What I'd like to know is, considering how brain-dead-simple lossless audio compression is, are there technical merits for using ALAC, especially on embedded devices? Does FLAC rely on floating point when ALAC is purely integer, thus making ALAC easier to implement? Is it easier to seek within an ALAC? Or, is Apple's insistance on ALAC purely a "not invented here" mentality?
No, I will not work for your startup
Your statement implies an intent that you do not have any evidence to support. How do you explain this move? Clearly they did not have to open source ALAC. Anyone who does something with this code will HAVE to comply with its license.
The US government have made it clear that we have no inalienable rights; any we do not defend vigorously will be taken.
Also,
* FLAC is less compute-intensive for decode
1
2
3
Means longer battery life and/or lower power processors.
But the RIAA is scared of Apple, so they insisted on a non-proprietary lossless format.
RIAA insisting on open formats?
Yeh, clearly apple only open sources things they have to. Because clang, alac, cups, ... don't exist.
Yet apple has kept darwin open-source, anyway.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
So why did apple release the source to darwin? Why are the pushing funding for clang? Why are they releasing sources and specs for bonjour, launchd, lib dispatch, etc?
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
You mean like darwin, clang/llvm funding, webkit, core foundation, lib dispatch, bonjour, etc, etc.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
FFmpeg has had support for ALAC, both encoding and decoding, thanks to a GSoC student, for more than three years. Just saying...
Has anyone managed to download the source code (except downloading it file by file from the trac browser)?
- Raynet --> .
No offense but the iPhone 4S supporting ALAC is hardly a shock since iOS has supported ALAC from the start which should imply that every iPod Touch and iPhone always supported ALAC. And if you check it up, every modern iPod supports ALAC, even the Shuffle. The Classic has supported it for years. Players not supporting ALAC isn't the reason that iTunes doesn't sell ALAC.
Apple does make the USB drivers for iPods available for download except with iTunes.
Try taking a fresh PC with iTunes never loaded and plug in your iPod/iPad/iPhone. Your PC will look for the driver and never find it.
Then search for a USB driver on Google.
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1538
Once you get that driver, I agree there are many bits of software you can use, but I don't believe there are open source drivers for Apple devices.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
I don't see why not. They are not interested in music, film, software or rights.
Why did Apple come up with yet another incompatible codec? FLAC is available under BSD, and ther eis obviously no difference in quality between ALAC and FLAC.
The only reason Apple doesn't support FLAC on their devices/iTunes is because FLAC music usually comes from outside of their iTunes store. And they surely don't want people to not get music elsewhere.
If Apple had any regard for open (source) standards they would've added support for FLAC, since technically it's a good format (maybe not the best, but good) and it's pretty much the de facto lossless standard, even tho lossless in general is not very popular.
And now with open sourcing ALAC it seems like they want to make it more accessible to manufacturers, so that they can freely sell ALAC (lossless) music in iTunes and hardware/software manufacturers will have no choice but to support yet another redundant format (well, if they want to serve Apple costumers).
I wouldn't mind it so much if ALAC had some clear technical advantages, but it doesn't. FLAC is pretty much the same in compression ratio, but is more efficient in encoding and decoding.
I don't want to sound like a fan of FLAC. If you have better alternatives, bring them on. But ALAC is not one, sorry.
IOW, it's business as usual from Apple.
Yes. The RIAA wants the player market to be entirely comoditised, so any music consumer can pay the smallest possible amount for multiple playback devices, but keep paying the RIAA for their content.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Why do you want FLAC to die?
I think everyone is missing the point. There's shn and FLAC and TTA, and WavPack, another codec isn't really needed. FLAC is open source.
But part of open source's beauty is you can examine someone else's code and use what you've learned to improve your own. If someone were to create a lossless codec with file sizes comparable to MP3 (I really don't see how one could), MP3 would die.
The RIAA is meaningless to me; I stopped buying RIAA music long ago. I sample my old analog media, and all the new music I listen to is indie. The RIAA is evil and I wish you folks would stop shoveling money at them.
Free Martian Whores!
....complete with many fanboys insisting that this is *completely different* to MS releasing a new format (like WMV) that no-one needs.
If someone were to create a lossless codec with file sizes comparable to MP3 (...), MP3 would die
I disagree. MP3 is good enough for the vast majority of people (it's not even plausible that someone can distinguish a 320kbps MP3 from a FLAC file when played on a cheap player, like most people have) and far too entrenched.
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As opposed to listening to music on my Android phone, which houses MP3s ripped from CDs I own right now?
I don't think so.
I'll also note that I was listening to music on a Nokia communicator before the iPhone was even known (also using MP3s ripped from CDs I own).
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
If they launched the whole OS as open source it would be a total bitch slap to Google and the Android platform. I know I would be excited. Hell, I might even turn Apple Fanboi.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
The vast majority of portable, dedicated digital music devices are made by Apple
Among marketers, "devices" has become a euphemism for locked-down appliances, so I got a bit confused.
but plenty of people use their phone or Media PC connected to a stereo to listen to music on.
And plenty of people who carry a cell phone carry either an iPhone or a dumbphone, neither of which is likely to support FLAC.
If you're using itunes (gag) / ipods, use alac. If not, use flac.
Are there any statistics for how many people use iTunes vs. don't use iTunes?
The Apache license is GPL-incompatible. Which is convenient for Apple, since they hate the GPL.
Perhaps the non-GUI calls it made were only POSIX calls, but it also made a ton of calls to Qt and KDE, which Apple had to redo
Making it incompatible with the code they'd started off with in the process, which eventually killed the original project. KHTML is now basically unusable on the modern web, all the developers having been siphoned off to Webkit, and it was very hard to find a decent Webkit-based browser for Linux until Google ported Chrome to it.
True that on cheap equipment an MP3 is indistinguishable from lossless, but convert your MP3 to a different lossy format and you lose even more. If FLAC files were as small as MP3 files, MP3 would have no advantage at all except for being entrenched. And many entrenched technologies have been superceded by superior tech. For example, Lotus was thoroughly entrenched and was THE spreadsheet, but Microsoft's superior Excel (and MS's underhanded tactics and Lotus' bad steps) pretty much killed Lotus.
Free Martian Whores!
You may consider it trolling, but I maintain and have defended my position in the other thread. Reading through the thread, I was not corrected because I did not make an incorrect statement. I still see the eco-system as a lock down, if not the device in particular. You may consider it subjective, but at least do not misrepresent what was said.
As for this thread and "bashing", I have not uttered a single ad hominem against Apple (which is not something you can say about your comments to me). I happen to disagree with their way of doing things.
Why are you so riled up over one person's dissatisfaction with Apple? Or is it that the smallest grain of truth in my discourse is bugging you?
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
I think it's GPLv3 compatible. It's not GPLv2 compatible because of the patent exception part.
Apple hates the GPLv3 because of the "Tivo" clause. Apple bought CUPS and continues to ship that under GPLv2.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
Standardization on one format has advantages, but since conversion to ALAC from FLAC and back again should be lossless, I suppose there's no need for FLAC to die. Nevertheless, I suspect since it's the less portable format since Apple dominates the music player space and won't support FLAC, it should begin to fizzle out assuming Apple maintains its market share.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
I don't know about that. Someone would produce a BSD-licensed implementation, which would make it cost close to nothing for software and device vendors to add support for it, and so they would because some customers would want it. Then a few years later when everything supports both it and MP3, there would be no reason to continue using MP3 for new audio.
I'm sure Apple will maintain its market share in the portable music player segment, but that market is dying as mobile phones have made the mp3 player superfluous. My phone can play FLAC files, but probably not ALAC.
Yeh, clearly apple only open sources things they have to. Because clang, alac, cups, ... don't exist.
"Darwin" would be a better choice than "cups" here; CUPS wasn't originally written by somebody at Apple (Apple hired Michael Sweet several years after CUPS came out), and was licensed under the GPL (and is now licensed under "the GNU General Public License ("GPL") and GNU Library General Public License ("LGPL"), Version 2, with exceptions for Apple operating systems and the OpenSSL toolkit").
Apple is so open they made their own OS out of BSD.
And that makes them less open because?
(Besides, it's more like "Apple is so open they bought NeXT, who had made their own OS out of the Mach kernel and BSD kernel and userland code, back in the days before BSD was open source, when they needed a new OS, and built an OS based on a lot of the NeXT code".)
It wasn't originally apple's, but it is theirs now – if they wanted to, they could un-open source it. They don't, because it would be shitty publicity, because it would stop them getting cool printer drivers from everyone else, and because they're not dicks. But yes, darwin deserves to be on that list too. As do many other things, CoreFoundation, quicktime streaming server, launchd, libdispatch, mDNSResponder, xnu, etc.
If you never convert formats that's true enough, but since I have no clue of what kind of format I might want in the future, I like to hold onto the a loseless copy when I can.
jobs: you will pry my source code out of my cold dead hand.
god: ok.
satan: both of you forgot about darwin and the stuff other than alac at mac os forge and stuff such as clang and lldb at llvm.org....
True, but now that ALAC is open source, it should be trivial to integrate support for it into arbitrary devices, such as your phone, with a simple software update.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!