ALAC is now FOSS

lupusarcanus · 10-27-2011, 08:18 PM

http://www.macrumors.com/2011/10/27/...w-open-source/

Good job Apple. Doesn't make much of a difference though.

sag47 · 10-28-2011, 01:12 AM

Cool. Hopefully Avidemux and Audacity include support for it

.

H_TeXMeX_H · 10-28-2011, 04:53 AM

That's the first good news I've heard from Apple in a long time.

cascade9 · 10-28-2011, 05:10 AM

Heh, apple releases ALAC under the Apache license. I could make a few comments about that.....But I'll just leave it as 'if apple likes open source so much, why dont they add .flac support to itunes , ipods, etc'?

Even if it was using a GPL licence, I would still use .flac over ALAC. Apart from everything else, flac has that great internal checksum, ALAC doesnt.

H_TeXMeX_H · 10-28-2011, 01:19 PM

Overall flac is better and has a better license, so there is no real reason to use alac over flac. Still, more open source software is better, and is extremely rare from Apple.

lupusarcanus · 10-28-2011, 05:16 PM

FLAC > ALAC. But for people with iPods/iPhones (like me), this is a nice, though small, development.

andrew.46 · 10-29-2011, 12:51 AM

I was excited but I have found that the files produced by alacconvert are unplayable with the svn MPlayer, and this has no trouble with the caf files found here:

http://samples.mplayerhq.hu/A-codecs/caf/

For those keen to try the source for alacconvert is here:

Code:

svn checkout http://svn.macosforge.org/repository/alac/trunk ALAC

You may need to adjust the makefile to successfully compile though, the following has been suggested:

Code:

sed -i_bak 's/$(CC) $(LFLAGS) $(OBJS) -o alacconvert/$(CC) $(OBJS) -o alacconvert $(LFLAGS)/' makefile

from within /convert-utility.

Mr. Macintosh · 03-21-2017, 08:24 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by H_TeXMeX_H

That's the first good news I've heard from Apple in a long time.

The funny thing is that, given the last few years of Mac hardware, there are a lot of folks who are leaving the Mac. Making ALAC FOSS just makes it serve as a bridge between Mac OS X and Linux. This way, you get a lossless format that you can use on anything. FLAC is nice, but Apple’s music players can’t play FLAC files. A universal lossless codec like ALAC is that it makes the Mac to Linux transition easier. If you re-ripped all of your CDs in ALAC (I did) when ALAC was released (or sometime after), your music collection is ready for your move to Linux. Then your files will already be in a Linux-supported and free/open source codec.

And yeah, I realize this thread is from 2011. Well, this is kind of an update. The Mac hardware in 2011 was great, but it’s been deteriorating over the years. Now, for the most part, new Macs can’t be upgraded, repaired or expanded. And last year, they took away all useful I/O from the 12” MacBook and the MacBook Pros.