[Ham Sandwich]

 
Quote:

ALAC has already been back-engineered so I don't see the problem.
 

 
It's still a problem because even though ALAC encoding and decoding has been reverse engineered you can't just add it to a commercial portable player or a commercial software media player.  There are significant legal issues, patent issues, and other issues in doing that.  ALAC is Apple's baby and they don't license it.  You can use the reverse engineered ALAC implementation in freeware products like Foobar.  But you'll notice that the ALAC components for software like that is often added by people in Eurasia Eastonia and way out of reach from the long arms of Apple lawyers.
 
dBpoweramp has ALAC support.  It's a reverse engineered implementation different from the common open source ALAC implementation.  dBpoweramp is a commercial product.  I don't know how he's managed to avoid the wrath of Apple lawyers over the ALAC support.

 

[ramicio]

I didn't even consider licensing for some stupid reason.  Apple is insane about patents and all that crap.  Every company is lately.  Every other day there is a patent lawsuit, and they all seem to be just ridiculous and a waste of the legal system's resources.  I don't get how dBpoweramp hasn't gotten in trouble.  Maybe it's because it doesn't actually come with it and the codec for it is a free add-on.  Hell they even have the Apple Lossless logo on the page for the codec without any mention of a copyright to Apple.  Quite daring.

 

[mikemalter]

Are you sure?  Isn't ALAC in the Squeezebox and Roku?
 
Quote:

 
Quote:

ALAC has already been back-engineered so I don't see the problem.
 

 
It's still a problem because even though ALAC encoding and decoding has been reverse engineered you can't just add it to a commercial portable player or a commercial software media player.  There are significant legal issues, patent issues, and other issues in doing that.  ALAC is Apple's baby and they don't license it.  You can use the reverse engineered ALAC implementation in freeware products like Foobar.  But you'll notice that the ALAC components for software like that is often added by people in Eurasia Eastonia and way out of reach from the long arms of Apple lawyers.
 
dBpoweramp has ALAC support.  It's a reverse engineered implementation different from the common open source ALAC implementation.  dBpoweramp is a commercial product.  I don't know how he's managed to avoid the wrath of Apple lawyers over the ALAC support.

 

[ramicio]

Big companies like that are going to pay licensing to Apple without question, especially for a device, which when you build you have to go through proper channels of government to pass tests and I'd imagine stuff has to be licensed even before they test it.  Stuff like devices doing ALAC might even be on silicon instead of software-based.