Great news!!! Apple Lossless audio codec (ALAC) now open source! - Page 2

I like apple but i am not a fanboy. But i am starting to like apple more and more the more i use their products.

I sent Xbox Support an e-mail yesterday regarding this. The customer service representative that received my e-mail didn't have any answers, but he said he forwarded the question to their product team. I really hope they'll add support for ALAC playback, although it's Microsoft, and they're not exactly best friends with Apple.

Before working on my lossless archive I ripped 10 CDs of different musical styles in both FLAC and ALAC to compare them. FLAC files were uniformly smaller, but at the highest compression rate only 1.2% smaller. Not significant enough to matter to me. Since ALAC's handling of metadata is more to my liking than FLAC's, and it was natively supported by my audio players, that's what I went with.

 

Ultimately, lossless is lossless. If you decide to go from one to the other, batch-transcoding them is trivial and can be done without altering the sound. The best format is whichever one you prefer, and that's more or less where that argument should end.

 

ALAC's open-sourcing benefits us in two ways: First, there's less risk of file obsolescence due to vendor lock-in (which is the reason why I researched FLAC formats in the first place), and second, it will eventually expand the range of options available in commercial audio products.

 

The ALAC standard permits high-res files (up to 384 khz/32 bit and 8 channels). Music vendors like HDTracks can hypothetically begin offering ALAC files alongside FLAC, assuming high-res ALAC is broadly supported in iTunes and iOS.

I see a FLAC player for iDevices at USD9.99 but it looks like it doesn't solve the prob of our 24/192 FLAC files :(

http://itunes.apple.com/sg/app/flac-player/id390532592?mt=8

 

 

 

Description

FLAC Player is a high-quality music player designed for lossless, gapless playback of albums and live recordings in FLAC format.

✚ New in 1.2.0: Playlist support and Album/Artist browsing ✚

With FLAC Player, loading music is easy and organization is automatic. Files are grouped into collections based on FLAC tags, or file names (if tags are not present). Quickly add music, artwork, and track lists using iTunes USB File Sharing.

FLAC Player supports the premier technologies on iOS4: background audio playback, remote control,
and import of files from other apps (Filer, Dropbox, even Safari)

Features:
☆ Lossless, gapless playback optimized for iOS
☆ Create, edit, and listen to playlists within the app
☆ Browse and play by Album and Artist
☆ Play/Shuffle your entire collection
☆ Decodes FLAC files up to 24-bit, 96kHz, with onboard playback up to 16-bit, 48kHz.
☆ 24-bit, 96kHz playback on iPad with USB DAC and Camera Connection Kit (see website)
☆ Bookmark any song and jump back to the same position
☆ Background audio playback (requires iOS4 multitasking)
☆ Remote controls (via headphone, lock screen, bluetooth, or dock connector - requires iOS4)
☆ Supports bluetooth headphones and audio devices (not recommended for quality)
☆ Supports AirPlay audio output including Apple TV 2 and AirPort Express
☆ Album art viewer (jpeg, png, tiff, bmp, gif)
☆ Text/Info file viewer (txt, pdf, html, doc, rtf)
☆ Sort FLAC files by track number, file name, date modified, or manually
☆ Optimized for low power-usage
 

Now that its open source and the iPod is the defacto standard for car audio source units , hopefully Kenwood or Alpine can add support for car audio use without the use of the iPod

Alac on a burned DVD or USB direct would be awesome imo

Free Lossless Audio Codec.

 

Why on Earth should anyone have to pay to listen to it? Highway Robbery from Apple.