News
Apple makes Apple Lossless open source
By Charles Starrett
Senior Editor, iLounge
Published: Friday, October 28, 2011
News Category: Apple, Digital Media
Apple has released its Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) as an open-source project. Debuted in 2004, ALAC is “a data compression method which reduces the size of audio files with no loss of information. A decoded ALAC stream is bit-for-bit identical to the original uncompressed audio file.” The project, released yesterday, contains the sources for the ALAC encoder and decoder, an example command line utility, and a description of a “magic cookie” for use based on the ISO case media file format. The Apple Lossless Audio Codec sources are available under the Apache license.
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1
It makes sense for Apple to give away ALAC. It’s not like they’re ever going to use it.
Posted by Farsnworth on October 28, 2011 at 10:33 PM (PDT)
2
@1: Not only that, it makes even more sense because Apple now makes native ALAC available to all the music conversion and editing programs which, hypothetically, will quiet all the people still screaming about how iTunes doesn’t support FLAC and the only converter that had a good reverse engineered ALAC encoder was dbPoweramp.
Posted by Code Monkey in Midstate New York on October 29, 2011 at 5:44 AM (PDT)