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by sandGorgon 5342 days ago
does this mean that FLAC will soon be irrelevant ?

Today a lot of high-fidelity audio players support FLAC as the default lossless format. This kinda meant that that iPods and these players lived in different universes as far as lossless is concerned.

If the release of this codec means that h/w manufacturers are able to incorporate this codec into their silicon (I'm not sure if the open source license extends to hardware), then effectively there is no real reason to use or support FLAC anymore (minor differences in quality nonwithstanding).

Anybody know which codec is more power efficient ?
1 comments
altrego99 5342 days ago
Irrelevant is a strong word, and I very much doubt it. The only reason for making this open source was for devices to be able to support this more. However FLAC has been open source for quite a while - consequently most device makers willing to make the effort to support loss-less audio codec already did so with FLAC. Support for ALAC will mostly come for these devices. Conversely, I see no reason for any device to support ALAC and not FLAC.

According to Wikipedia, FLAC is more efficient in encoding/decoding speeds - with same compression ratio. This translates to it being more power efficient.

Lastly this news will matter to only a few audiophiles who are also Apple geeks.

Making something open source is a welcome gesture, but I hope Apple will do this for other items which will have better reaching consequences.

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sandGorgon 5342 days ago
Conversely, I see no reason for any device to support ALAC and not FLAC.

Isnt this implemented in silicon (or atleast implemented as some DSP-specific library) ? AFAIK that costs money.

Today, if you wanted a lossless player, that player had to have FLAC - which was taken from a commercial vendor like Tensilica [1]. But now that ALAC is an alternative, why would I even try to spend more money and also add FLAC ?

Plus, it is reasonably trivial to convert all FLAC to ALAC [2]

[1] http://www.tensilica.com/products/audio/audio-codecs/flac.ht... or http://www.tensilica.com/products/audio/audio-codecs.htm (no ALAC)

[2] http://www.dbpoweramp.com/dmc.htm

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