[shmerl]

> And even ALAC is now open source and royalty-free.

Nothing stops them from supporting FLAC as well except their nasty attitude in general. FLAC is actually used by many services which sell music, unlike ALAC.

AAC is nowhere patent free.

[anon1385]

>Nothing stops Mozilla from supporting JPEG2000 except their nasty attitude in general. JPEG2000 is actually supported by many image editors, unlike APNG.

I think in most of these cases the real reasons are more mundane - spending the resources on supporting extra formats would give them no competitive advantage (and a significant cost in terms of maintenance and security). It sucks, but that's the capitalist system for you.

[gcp]

That analogy seems to ignore that FLAC is literally the lossless format that is used everywhere - except on Apple devices, and has not and never had patent concerns. On top of that, ALAC is clearly based on FLAC but has effectively been worsened. It is pure and 100% literal NIH. The same can't be said for JPEG2000. Not even close.

Nobody's complaining Apple doesn't support actual MPEG ALS, for example.

[eridius]

Supported everywhere != used everywhere. In my experience, extremely few people use FLAC, because there's almost never a reason to care about having a lossless audio codec. I'm pretty sure I've seen FLAC mentioned by people coming up with reasons to complain about Apple several orders of magnitude more times than I've actually seen FLAC in the wild.

[shmerl]

> Supported everywhere != used everywhere. In my experience, extremely few people use FLAC,

Way more than ALAC. Music in FLAC is provided by many music services and digital stores. Music in ALAC? I never saw it being sold anywhere.

> because there's almost never a reason to care about having a lossless audio codec.

That's utter nonsense. Any time you want to reencode your music, you care about the lossless codec for the source, otherwise you'll degrade your quality. For example if tomorrow some state of the art lossy codec comes out which reduces size / computational complexity of decoding (such as Opus for instance), you can reencode your audio library in it for usage in mobile devices and so on. But without lossless sources that won't be an option. Lossless codecs are functionally equivalent to audio CDs. Lossy ones are not.

[eridius]

> Music in ALAC? I never saw it being sold anywhere.

Because almost nobody has any reason to want lossless music. Anyone buying music in FLAC is deluding themselves if they think they can hear a difference between that and a properly encoded lossy codec like MP3 or AAC.

> Any time you want to reencode your music, you care about the lossless codec for the source, otherwise you'll degrade your quality.

True. But this is an issue for so few people as to be effectively zero. Extremely few people actually do this sort of thing, and I would wager that most of them aren't Apple customers to begin with.

If Apple had infinite engineering resources, then yes, it would be nice to solve every single problem for every person, everywhere. But Apple's engineering resources are not infinite, and it would be a flagrant waste of those resources to spend them on issues like this that impact effectively zero Apple users.

[nitrogen]

Anyone buying music in FLAC is deluding themselves if they think they can hear a difference between that and a properly encoded lossy codec like MP3

Because of inadequacies of the MP3 encoding format, no bitrate of MP3, even the max, can encode all possible things that the human ear can distinguish. There is one song I know of with a particular synthesized effect in the upper treble that is very profoundly different from the lossless original even in a VBR0 or 320kbit MP3.

Additionally, I've read that MP3 (I don't know about AAC) doesn't preserve enough phase information for effective use with matrix-encoded (e.g. Dolby Pro Logic) surround sound audio.

But Apple's engineering resources are not infinite, and it would be a flagrant waste of those resources to spend them on issues like this that impact effectively zero Apple users.

What was wasteful was inventing ALAC instead of using FLAC.

[shmerl]

> True. But this is an issue for so few people as to be effectively zero.

Why not? Keeping a master copy can be an issue for any user who cares about quality. You can see it as keeping a master tape, so any subsequent copy (=lossy encoding) won't degrade the quality too far.

> and I would wager that most of them aren't Apple customers to begin with.

Why so? Is it some kind of stereotype that Apple customers don't care about quality of music or can't be audiophiles?

> If Apple had infinite engineering resources, then yes, it would be nice to solve every single problem for every person, everywhere.

Adding FLAC support in their QuickTime framework is trivial. Excusing the lack of support for it by lack of engineering resources in Apple should be just embarrassing for them, not even to mention that it simply would be a lie.

[shmerl]

> Nothing stops Mozilla from supporting JPEG2000

Patents stop them (JPEG2000 is not a free format). FLAC is not patented. Q.E.D. Apple don't supported it just in order to be nasty to everyone.

[anon1385]

>Patents stop them (JPEG2000 is not a free format).

Oh please, stop with this FUD. JPEG2000 is no different to Ogg or VP8 in that regard, both of which Mozilla is happy to ship. It was designed to be usable without having to licence any patents. Any known patents have been waived. The possibility of unknown patents remains but is vanishingly small by this point (other organisations much larger than Mozilla have been shipping JPEG2000 code for years).

http://www.jpeg.org/jpeg2000/index.html

>Furthermore, it includes guidelines and examples, a bibliography of technical references, and a list of companies from whom patent statements have been received by ISO. JPEG 2000 was developed with the intention that Part 1 could be implemented without the payment of licence fees or royalties, and identified patent holders have waived their rights toward this end. However, the JPEG committee cannot make a formal guarantee, and it remains the responsibility of the implementer to ensure that no patents are infringed.

What the fuck does Mozilla even mean by "free format" these days? It's an ISO standard, it was designed to be usable without paying any fees, there is a waiver of any known patents, it's been used across the industry for years without legal problems. I can't think of a single way that it could be made "more free". The only possible reason I can see is that it wasn't invented by Mozilla/Xiph. And really that is just pathetic and very much a "nasty attitude".

[shmerl]

It's not fully patent free:

> It has always been a strong goal of the JPEG committee that its standards should be implementable in their baseline form without payment of royalty and license fees...

It's only for baseline.

> is no different to Ogg or VP8 in that regard

They are patent free, no strings attached, unlike JPEG2000.

[eridius]

I can't decide if you genuinely believe that Apple is deciding not to spend resources supporting FLAC because you think they have a "nasty attitude", or if you're deliberately misrepresenting the reasons that lead to such a decision.

Supporting FLAC requires investing engineer resources in doing this, and possibly legal resources as well. It's only something that Apple would do if there's any benefit to them doing it. And there doesn't really seem to be any benefit toward it. None of Apple's hardware supports FLAC natively, so adding support to SO X would actually be rather counterproductive as anyone using it would have to transcode it to some other format to get power-efficient decoding support on mobile devices anyway. And Apple's already had their own lossless compression codec (ALAC) for over a decade. Pretty much the only benefit to supporting FLAC natively would be to make things very slightly easier for the 0.0001% of their customers that acquire music in the FLAC format.

[shmerl]

> Supporting FLAC requires investing engineer resources in doing this, and possibly legal resources as well. It's only something that Apple would do if there's any benefit to them doing it.

FLAC is patent free and actively used (commercially including) by many parties big and small, so this legal FUD is totally unconvincing. ALAC isn't supported in hardware any better than FLAC, so that argument completely misses the point.

> Apple's already had their own lossless compression codec (ALAC) for over a decade

And for over than a decade "couldn't find resources" to support FLAC which is actually used unlike ALAC. Poor, poor Apple.

[eridius]

> And for over than a decade "couldn't find resources" to support FLAC which is actually used unlike ALAC.

Are you really this uninformed, or do you just like to make things up when the facts don't go your way?

ALAC was created for the purpose of streaming audio between Apple devices. I believe it was first used to stream audio to an AirPort Express (which has audio output, so you can plug a speaker into it and stream music from iTunes to that speaker). I assume it's still used for that purpose, but it's also used for the more general category of streaming audio over AirPlay. Given that, I would wager that ALAC is used many orders of magnitude more than FLAC is, even if it's not directly exposed to the end user.

[shmerl]

ALAC was pure NIH, since FLAC existed before it. And it wasn't even open until much later. Anyway, it's not any excuse for Apple not to support FLAC. It's irrelevant to this subject really.