Apple's Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) Now Open Source 526
Revotron writes "Apple has released the full source to their Apple Lossless Audio Codec under the Apache license. ALAC was developed by Apple and deployed on all of its platforms and devices over the last 10 years. Could the release of the ALAC source code mark a possible first step in opening up more of the iOS platform?"
Re:Why not... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:open source, patent encumbered (Score:4, Informative)
Apache license clause 3, coward.
Re:Why not... (Score:5, Informative)
It seems like FLAC has a slight compression edge
Not according to this table.
http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Lossless_comparison [hydrogenaudio.org]
Note for the compression ratio, smaller percentage is better. ALAC is slightly better than FLAC. But it's so marginal it makes no difference.
Re:Why not... (Score:4, Informative)
You *might* have a point about the connectors, but then again, that applies to many, many electronics manufacturers. You are *not* locked to iTunes, neither for the store or for updating your iPod. Spin your FUD elsewhere
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Re:Great, but how about patents? (Score:5, Informative)
Apache License...
3. Grant of Patent License. Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this section) patent license to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer the Work, where such license applies only to those patent claims licensable by such Contributor that are necessarily infringed by their Contribution(s) alone or by combination of their Contribution(s) with the Work to which such Contribution(s) was submitted. If You institute patent litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that the Work or a Contribution incorporated within the Work constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, then any patent licenses granted to You under this License for that Work shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed.
Re:Why not... (Score:5, Informative)
No, the connectors that interface with the PC are standard USB or Firewire. This is FUD. Any MP3, AAC, AIFF, or WAV will work with an iPod, iPhone, iPad, etc. You are NOT required to use iTunes either. There are a multitude of alternatives (http://www.sourceforge.net). Even if you choose to use iTunes, it can be set to use MP3 if you don't like AAC.
I mean seriously, 2 seconds on Google would net you a decent list of alternatives without any effort at all:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/227348/apple_itunes_alternatives_make_managing_your_music_easy.html [pcworld.com]
Frankly I think some of the folks on here are so Anti-Apple they dont' even bother to verify what they post anymore. They just regurge the same bile that seems all too common in here these days.
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What are ALAC's technical merits? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Why not... (Score:5, Informative)
This is not true, at least not for everything. All the alternatives rely on libgpod and it does not support the newer devices:
"This release has support for all iPod models except the iPod Nano 6g (the touch one). Most non-jailbroken iOS devices (iPod Touch, iPhone) are also supported with the notable exception of the iPad and the iPhone/iPod Touch 4 which are only supported as read-only devices."
Maybe you should verify what you say by googling for two seconds ;-)
Re:Why not... (Score:5, Informative)
AAC, developed by Dolby,
Incorrect. AAC was developed in an MPEG standards process. It was mostly based on the work of James D. Johnston ("JJ") who worked for Bell Labs at the time.
Basically, AAC started out as "PAC", which was JJ Johnston's follow-on to MP3. See slide 5 of this presentation (PowerPoint format, sorry, but LibreOffice Impress does open it):
http://www.aes.org/sections/pnw/ppt/jj/pac_history.ppt [aes.org]
JJ was quite unhappy with some of the compromised in MP3, compromises that were forced upon him by the standards process. PAC was his improved coder, which didn't include the parts he didn't like from MP3. PAC won the "bake-off" between prospective coders; it was enough better than the others that MPEG reconsidered their "backward compatible" strategy and decided to go ahead with "non-backward compatible" (NBC).
The Wikipedia page on AAC makes strangely little mention of JJ Johnston and his contributions, but if you look at the footnotes you will notice "J D Johnston" being frequently mentioned, especially in conjunction with the patents involved.
JJ is a good guy who deserves more credit than he gets on Wikipedia.
steveha
Re:Why not... (Score:5, Informative)
A clock with a USB port is by necessity a much more complex device than a clock with an Apple dock connector. Aside from having to implement the USB mass storage specification, it also has to have its own audio hardware. Your MP3 player is just acting as a glorified hard drive, and the clock is doing all the work. Also, if you're using any audio functionality that isn't exposed over mass storage, or isn't supported by the clock's hardware, then it won't work.
With an Apple dock connector, the clock only has to use the analogue signal from the dock connector's line out, and pass it straight to the amplifier. It will probably also use a subset of the Apple Accessory Protocol [nuxx.net] to provide audio controls - this works across a dedicated set of pins on the connector and is pretty simple to implement. With a dock connector, your iPod is doing all the work, so your clock is cheaper and with fewer compatibility concerns.
It's no surprise that most manufacturers have gone down the route of including a dock connector at the expense of USB. The dock connector is supported by the majority (or certainly a large minority) of audio playing devices in users' hands, it's simpler to implement, and there won't be the questions over compatibility that would plague the equivalent USB device. It's not rudeness, it's good business sense.
Most clocks like this will also have a standard 3.5 mm minijack line-in for compatibility with other devices anyway. Mine does.
And yes, I'm still annoyed that Intel didn't think about implementing and standardising extra functionality such as this when it was designing USB 3.0. The time was right.
Re:Why not... (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know any non-nerd who uses Vorbis or FLAC.
Actually, a lot of non-nerds do, they just don't know it. Nearly all games (on the consoles and PC/Mac) use ogg vorbis for the background music. The reason is that it doesn't cost anything (as opposed to mp3), and the game has to supply the music files and the decoder to play them anyways.
Re:Why not... (Score:4, Informative)
You are NOT required to use iTunes either.
On all modern iPods, you need a secret cryptographic key to be able to add or remove tracks that's specific to your iPod's serial number. Some very hard-working hackers have managed to reverse-engineer the algorithm in iTunes to generate keys from serial numbers, but after the first time they did this Apple changed the algorithm and threw all their code-obfuscation and anti-debugging techniques that they'd developed for the iTunes DRM into protecting it. They managed to deobfuscate it and get the new key generation algorithm, though Apple used legal threats to take down all info on how they did it so the next time Apple change their algorithm you'd better hope the original people are still around and willing.
(Oh, and for iPhone and iPod Touch they go to a fair bit of effort to change the encryption and authentication keys with every major iOS update, if not more often.)