| > For those vanishingly small number of people who have an actual use for FLAC This approach of dumbifying users to brainless consumers of content is extremely annoying. I consider any company that treats all users that way to be simply insulting. I don't mean those who cater for non technical users and being very user friendly. I welcome that. I mean those who proclaim that they can cripple functionality of what already exists with their justification that all users are dumb and would never need it. For instance, audio CDs offer two features - good quality of sound and lossless data (i.e. which you can reencode to any lossy format with transparency without degrading quality). Those features are there for years already. Now, comes the digital age and normal services offer a substitute - FLAC. Comes Apple and says - users are dumb, no one needs that functionality. No CDs for you, and no lossless audio either. Take our AAC, and if you want to reencode - get lost. Well, that's insulting. But Apple aren't alone in it. For instance you can't buy FLAC on Amazon either. On the other hand, other services respect their users more and give an option of lossless audio. Just because they can and it's easy to provide. See Cdbaby, Bandcamd and etc. They offer FLAC files along with a variety of lossy codecs. But this isn't even so much about sellers. We are talking about support in players / systems. One should be a jerk not to provide support when one can treat users with more respect and simply add that support for most common lossless codec. > assertions that Apple is intentionally choosing not to support FLAC out of some personified desire to screw their users is ridiculous, right? I see no valid reason for them not to support it, when their own users asked them multiple times to do it. Apple dismissed them. So they do want to screw their users. Or may be simply their dislike of free codecs is stronger than their interest to help their own users. I honestly see no single valid reason for them not to do it, especially since it's trivial. It's available in every possible third party player imaginable. But Apple? No, they pretend it doesn't exist. |