[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.