[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.