[mark2410]

i was wondering how many out there would be interested in seeing DAP's supporting ALAC now that its gone open source?
 
I for one really would love to see it so i dont have to keep multiple music libraries, one for the ipod and one for everything else.  my recient attempt to keep a 320kb (vbr) library for everything else has recently met with fail when i realised its just not quito good enough for everything else.  so while i hate apple for not supporting flac and for not allowing on the fly rencoding to other formats beyond at best 256kb aac.

 

[grokit]

I just got an old Rockboxed iPod Mini from Alphapheonix, it plays ALAC.

 

[davidcotton]

Quote:

i was wondering how many out there would be interested in seeing DAP's supporting ALAC now that its gone open source?
 
I for one really would love to see it so i dont have to keep multiple music libraries, one for the ipod and one for everything else.  my recient attempt to keep a 320kb (vbr) library for everything else has recently met with fail when i realised its just not quito good enough for everything else.  so while i hate apple for not supporting flac and for not allowing on the fly rencoding to other formats beyond at best 256kb aac.

I just gave up on that and use everything as alac.

 

[NZtechfreak]

I use FLAC on my iPhone 4S (via a GoFlex Satellite 500GB drive w/8Player, and also with FLAC player for local playback). It's not particularly difficult to work around Apple's restrictions, and I wasn't about to re-encode my FLAC music collection to ALAC for playback on iOS devices.
 
When did ALAC go open source though, that is interesting news for me. Not about to start using it despite that, given my understanding it that it's not as space efficient as FLAC? Perhaps you guys can confirm or refute that for me?

 

[FlatNine]

Quote:

I use FLAC on my iPhone 4S (via a GoFlex Satellite 500GB drive w/8Player, and also with FLAC player for local playback). It's not particularly difficult to work around Apple's restrictions, and I wasn't about to re-encode my FLAC music collection to ALAC for playback on iOS devices.
 
When did ALAC go open source though, that is interesting news for me. Not about to start using it despite that, given my understanding it that it's not as space efficient as FLAC? Perhaps you guys can confirm or refute that for me?

 
I have my entire library in both FLAC and ALAC (easy to rip to both simultaneously with dbPowerAmp) and they occupy about the same amount of disk space on my drive. ( Between 300 - 350 MB per CD).  ALAC went open source around October 2011.

 

[Redrider469]

When did ALAC go open source though, that is interesting news for me. Not about to start using it despite that, given my understanding it that it's not as space efficient as FLAC? Perhaps you guys can confirm or refute that for me?

I believe that ALAC is more space efficient than FLAC. FLAC does have the 8 different settings for compression but I'm just going off of the default setting (usually 5).
ALAC uses a variable bit rate where FLAC uses a fixed one. Both are lossless but ALAC and the encoder determines what parts of the song deserve more space and that variable bit rate will save more space over a fixed bit rate. The difference though is miniscule and when comparing this to the whole size of a media library or a CD, it doesn't really matter. This is just my experience with the codecs.

As for DAP's supporting ALAC, that would be nice but it wouldn't be a deal breaker for me. I use rockbox and I don't see myself going back to anything else. All the support for codecs I'll ever need are supported there so I guess you could say that I want companies not to install anything on their DAP's that would inhibit the installation of rockbox

 

[Shadin]

Quote:

I believe that ALAC is more space efficient than FLAC. FLAC does have the 8 different settings for compression but I'm just going off of the default setting (usually 5).
ALAC uses a variable bit rate where FLAC uses a fixed one. Both are lossless but ALAC and the encoder determines what parts of the song deserve more space and that variable bit rate will save more space over a fixed bit rate. The difference though is miniscule and when comparing this to the whole size of a media library or a CD, it doesn't really matter. This is just my experience with the codecs.
As for DAP's supporting ALAC, that would be nice but it wouldn't be a deal breaker for me. I use rockbox and I don't see myself going back to anything else. All the support for codecs I'll ever need are supported there so I guess you could say that I want companies not to install anything on their DAP's that would inhibit the installation of rockbox

 
Actually FLAC is the smaller option at level 5 or 6 that most frontends default to, but the difference is minimal.  Both use variable bitrate in the same way that lossless audio can be variable bitrate, they maintain whatever amount of information is required to reproduce the original audio.  The only difference is the container and compression algorithm used, you're basically comparing RAR to 7z.

 

[bowei006]

FLAC's on my desktop. And MP3's that were encoded from the FLAC's on my iPod. Works out well.