[angus77]

Is there an advantage to this for someone who owns no Apple products and has no iTunes account?

EDIT: Looking at http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Lossless_compa... it looks like the only clear advantage ALAC has is iTunes/iDevice support. FLAC has faster encoding/decoding speeds, and it's unknown if ALAC has error handling (which FLAC has). FLAC also supports RIFF chunks, has pipe support and is ReplayGain compatible, and has some support for embedded CUE sheets.

[mitjak]

And yet the most major popular MP3 player on the market can't play FLAC, which will probably mean it will remain as obscure as it is now (i.e., mostly used among audiophiles).

[tomjen3]

Not really. Flac is lossles, and based on what the grandparent said a better format.

So, store your music in flac and convert as needed.

[cageface]

That's what I do. The point of lossless is to have a stable archive that can be converted into the convenient format and bitrate of the day. It's great that Apple is finally open-sourcing their codec but it would have been far better if they'd just thrown their weight behind FLAC in the first place and avoided this completely gratuitous and consumer-unfriendly fragmentation.

[nickloewen]

> would have been far better if they'd just thrown their weight behind FLAC

That would definitely be better, but the fact is that they can't (reasonably) re-write all of the previous iDevice firmwares to support FLAC, so open sourcing ALAC benefits all of the users with those devices. If open source codecs is the route Apple is going down, then perhaps they will ad support for FLAC to new versions of iOS, but for everyone not using those versions, this would still help. Throwing weight behind FLAC is good, just throwing weight behind FLAC is slightly less good. All that said, using lossless codecs on an iPod, like you said, is a bit overkill.

What I think would really be nice is if Apple would open source the music database on the iPod -- not being able to load an iPod from Linux/not iTunes (easily) is much more of an issue for me than support for a lossless codec.

[cageface]

What I meant was that it would have been much better if they'd originally thrown their weight behind FLAC instead of developing ALAC in the first place. We're stuck with it now. I think it's very unlikely they'll ever add support for FLAC in iTunes or iOS now.

[blasdel]

It wasn't originally developed for direct consumer use at all — it's debut was in the protocol used by Airport Express streaming.

[ZeroGravitas]

It's not that obscure. You can buy Metallica and Beatles tracks in FLAC.

[aidenn0]

I googled for FLAC combined with a couple of different artists I listen to. Every single hit on the first page was a bittorrent site. I added "-torrent" and got a bunch of non-bittorrent file-sharing sites. :(

[thomaslangston]

Most, if not all of the tracks on bandcamp.com are sold with a FLAC option.

[cageface]

FLAC is the defacto lossless standard everywhere but iTunes. Boomkat, Bleep etc sell FLAC files. It also works in music software like Traktor, Ableton Live and Renoise.

FLAC is honestly one of the happier OSS success stories.

[aw3c2]

Predicting the future based on current popularity is utterly useless. Just think of the Internet Explorer.

[Duff]

Yes, think of internet explorer.

A decade later, many developers are still supporting IE6's peculiar dialect of HTML. And a few are still supporting IE5's even more peculiar dialect.

[lloeki]

I read a comparison months (if not years) ago where one voluntarily flicked random bits and erased portions of files in FLAC and ALAC files, and the result was that ALAC was way, way more resilient than FLAC.

[powrtoch]

> it's unknown if ALAC has error handling

Shouldn't take us long to find out now.

[blasdel]

When I was comparing them years ago I found that a lot of FLAC implementations had a lot of trouble with seeking properly, skipping to the wrong spot and then reporting a third spot as the current timecode.

Then you have the metadata problem — ALAC is in a normal mp4 container so everything's uniform and well-used, with FLAC you're stuck with the ogg container or its proprietary system. That wouldn't be so bad, except that almost nobody puts metadata in their FLAC files, instead preferring to bundle along separate text files with a description of the tracks and info about the rip. I think they do it so that the whole file's hash stays constant.

[cageface]

I haven't found that to be the case at all. All the FLAC files I've purchased have proper FLAC tags, often including cover art. I've never had problems with FLAC seeking at all.

Better still, FLAC provides excellent command-line tools for encoding, decoding and tagging so I can script batch operations easily. I'm not aware of anything similar for ALAC. Maybe with the codec in the open these tools will emerge?

[BitMastro]

Unfortunately I'm getting more and more biased against Apple these days, but then why they didn't use FLAC from the beginning? The FLAC format was stable from 2001 and Apple introduced ALAC in 2004, was it just as a way to be able to use DRM?

[kennystone]

Apple needed DRM at the beginning to get label deals. Now they don't.

[Anechoic]

DRM was never a consideration for ALAC since Apple never sold tracks in ALAC. My understanding was that Apple developed ALAC instread of using FLAC because they were concerned about possible patent problems with FLAC.

[ZeroGravitas]

I heard the same theory about patents but after they reversed engineered it, the creator of FLAC pointed out it was effectively a superset of his codec, so any patent affecting FLAC would impact ALAC too, they'd only increased their exposure to patents.

Other theories included better PPC support, and better designed to be decoded in low power hardware like the Airport Express.

To be honest some combination of NIH syndrome and residual squeamishness about using open source code seems far more likely.

[Someone]

I do not understand how ALAC can be both:

- effectively a superset of FLAC

- better designed to be decoded in low power hardware

Can you explain?

[myspy]

As far as I know, is FLAC de- and encoding more battery consuming than using ALAC. So ALAC is the mobile format to go.

[cabirum]

The FLAC repository havent been updated for two years.. Shouldn't it be called dead?

[darklajid]

What is the newest mp3 "format feature" you're using?

From which git repository do you clone your encoding software?

Have you used WAV files recently? I haven't read about major progress on that front either.