Apple Lossless Audio Codec is now open source (Apache license)

Is there an advantage to this for someone who owns no Apple products and has no iTunes account?<p>EDIT: Looking at <a href="http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Lossless_comparison#Apple_Lossless_Audio_Codec_.28ALAC.29" rel="nofollow">http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Lossless_compa...</a> it looks like the only clear advantage ALAC has is iTunes/iDevice support. FLAC has faster encoding/decoding speeds, and it's unknown if ALAC has error handling (which FLAC has). FLAC also supports RIFF chunks, has pipe support and is ReplayGain compatible, and has some support for embedded CUE sheets.

For those unfamiliar with the site, MacOSForge is an official Apple site which hosts repositories for code included in OS X (see <a href="http://www.opensource.apple.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.opensource.apple.com/</a> and the sidebar)<p>The announcement with timestamp for today is on the homepage: <a href="http://www.macosforge.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.macosforge.org/</a>

This is fantastic. Apple uses AAC partly because of the patent royalty (<a href="http://mp3licensing.com/" rel="nofollow">http://mp3licensing.com/</a>) which they have to pay on every iPad/pod/etc sold, as well as because it is just a better format.<p>MP3 is a total racket held by Thompson Technicolor, on top of being a pretty crap format.<p>Hopefully this is a portends Apple offering lossless through ITMS on top of the 1080p rights they are hunting down right now.

I've got all my CDs ripped in ALAC so that I can use the iTunes option to have the tracks automatically transcoded to smaller, lossy AAC when putting them on iDevices.<p>I welcome this open sourcing because it makes my 'archival' format slightly less oddball.

Someone came up with a reverse engineered decoder 6+ years ago:<p><a href="http://craz.net/programs/itunes/alac.html" rel="nofollow">http://craz.net/programs/itunes/alac.html</a><p>Nice to have an encoder now too.

I just tried building libalac.a on Linux using GCC 4.6.1 and it worked! There were quite a few warnings though.<p>To eliminate the warnings, edit /trunk/codec/makefile and add -Wno-multichar to CFLAGS.

There's no mention of a patent grant. Does anybody know the state of ALAC with regards to patents?

What's the point of this over flac?

I suspect that the big news here might be Airplay.<p>If you put this together with the rumours of an AppleTV there could be something very special here, especially if they are pre-emtively paving the way for open-source, 3rd party developers.

Would be great if android implemented encoding to that format now. Its a pain to try to get the same audio formats from both Android and iOS devices because both platforms encode to completely different formats.

does this mean that FLAC will soon be irrelevant ?<p>Today a lot of high-fidelity audio players support FLAC as the default lossless format. This kinda meant that that iPods and these players lived in different universes as far as lossless is concerned.<p>If the release of this codec means that h/w manufacturers are able to incorporate this codec into their silicon (I'm not sure if the open source license extends to hardware), then effectively there is no <i>real</i> reason to use or support FLAC anymore (minor differences in quality nonwithstanding).<p>Anybody know which codec is more power efficient ?

This is amazing. Since running Mugasha for the past few years, encoding in AAC has been a huge hassle. Lib faac has terrible encoding quality compared to good ones like Nero and Apple.

What I don't get is why don't places like iTunes and Amazon offer Lossless options for downloading? I mean, here they are bragging about 720p, 1080p, high definition video which is gigantic in size, approaching or exceeding gigabytes for a typical 2 hour movie. Yet, we can't spare the extra space or bandwidth for a higher quality audio file which is still a fraction of the size? I don't get it.

I hope Google adds (hardware) support for this to Android - it would add another option for patent un-encumbered audio formats, outside of Vorbis.

A successor to MP3.<p>We know there are better formats than MP3 today but getting mass adoption is difficult. Open source ALAC will give birth to new 3rd party supporting players, not to mention apple products already supports it &#38; we have higher chances of mass adoption.

FINALLY!!! But what does this mean for the future of FLAC?

I see a trac browser for SVN, but i see no SVN link. Any idea what that may be or what an easy way to determine it is?

Anyone know the URL for the repo? It looks like they're using Subversion, but I don't see any svn:// links anywhere.

Awesome! Now embedded devices like my car will be able to play more than just MP3's!

Open source, sure. But patent free?<p>Comment here indicates no:<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3166268" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3166268</a><p>If AAC costs $1/device to implement, who exactly cares that the code is "opened"?