Apple's Lossless ALAC Open Sourced
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 28th Oct 2011 20:42 UTC, submitted by poundsmack
Apple Apple has open sourced ALAC. "The Apple Lossless Audio Codec is an audio codec developed by Apple and supported on iPhone, iPad, most iPods, Mac and iTunes. 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 Apple Lossless Audio Codec project contains the sources for the ALAC encoder and decoder. Also included is an example command line utility, called alacconvert, to read and write audio data to/from Core Audio Format and WAVE files. A description of a 'magic cookie' for use with files based on the ISO base media file format (e.g. MP4 and M4A) is included as well. The Apple Lossless Audio Codec sources are available under the Apache license."
E-mail Print r 1   28 Comment(s) http://osne.ws/jhy
Thread beginning with comment 495104
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
RE: 24bit music
by ruinevil on Tue 1st Nov 2011 01:04 UTC in reply to "24bit music"
ruinevil
Member since:
2009-01-08

It's pretty hard to find 24bit music, since audio CD's are only 16bit 44.1khz PCM streams. Converting 16 to 24 would just add 8 0s to every value, changing nothing.

I probably would not be able to hear the difference with foobar2000 feeding a receiver via SPDIF using WASAPI.

Everyone can agree lossless always sounds better than MP3, especially electronica and classical; psychoaural compression has its limits.

Reply Parent Score: 1

RE[2]: 24bit music
by zima on Fri 4th Nov 2011 23:59 in reply to "RE: 24bit music"
zima Member since:
2005-07-06

Everyone can agree lossless always sounds better than MP3, especially electronica and classical; psychoaural compression has its limits.

I can't; with "always" this claim is also too strong.

You can quite easily find examples / settings where lossless will sound better than lossy, sure, but not anywhere near "always" - not only this requires just one counterexample to falsify, there are also many cases of people (also those previously thinking they can easily hear the difference) who were "shocked" at how low bitrates they still couldn't tell a difference from the originals, when performing for the first time a proper ABX testing.

Edited 2011-11-05 00:05 UTC

Reply Parent Score: 2