[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.

[eridius]

> You can see it as keeping a master tape, so any subsequent copy (=lossy encoding) won't degrade the quality too far.

Yes, the concept is not what's at question here. What's at question is how many people actually are inclined to ever care about something like this, and the answer is almost nobody. Very few people care to reencode their audio files.

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

Why do you leap to the worst possible assumption about everything Apple? You seem to have an extremely strong bias here.

Most Apple customers probably buy their music from the iTunes Music Store and don't ever think about reencoding it, because there's no point. Similarly, most people who buy music from other stores get it already encoded in a lossy format appropriate for listening to. Far and away the biggest reason to be reencoding is when ripping music from an audio CD, and iTunes already supports that. Once ripped, there's no reason to go about reencoding it again, as we've already long since passed the point where people can discern a difference.

The only really legitimate reason to be caring about this sort of thing is when you're doing professional audio work (as opposed to mucking about with music for personal listening), and people who are doing professional audio work aren't using iTunes for this work anyway so that's pretty irrelevant.

> Adding FLAC support in their QuickTime framework is trivial.

That's absurdly naive. It would be practically criminal negligence for Apple to download the latest libFLAC and drop it into the OS they ship to millions of customers without spending significant engineering resources reviewing the code. Then there's the ongoing maintenance burden, of dealing with upstream changes, local bugfixes, and just plain integration with the rest of the QuickTime stack. And if iTunes supports it, then iPhones and iPads really ought to support it if it's at all possible, and that's a really large engineering effort to do so in a way that's power-efficient, if that's even possible (given the lack of hardware support for it).

And that's just what comes to mind off the top of my head. I'm sure there's more that would be involved as well.

And for what? What would you gain from having iTunes support FLAC? You should be transcoding into some other format already for actual use in listening, because there's no point in carrying around large lossless files for personal listening, especially if you use any mobile devices (or laptops). You don't need iTunes to support FLAC just to transcode it, you already have options there, and as long as you aren't transcoding to Ogg Vorbis then your resulting file should work in iTunes (and on iPhones and iPads).

[shmerl]

> Then there's the ongoing maintenance burden, of dealing with upstream changes, local bugfixes, and just plain integration with the rest of the QuickTime stack.

Yes, and Apple perfectly did all that when it came to their own ALAC, as you already mentioned. Not FLAC though. NIH I guess. Or just "screw your customer". Such serious company like Apple being unable to support FLAC with QA and upstream updates? I don't believe that. They just don't want to. And not because it's costly (it's nothing for them), and not because they are scared of legal threats (there are none - it's used in tons of places just fine). It's just Apple being Apple the way I see it.