Hacker News Reader

Comment by yehaaa | Hacker News Reader

The format is ALAC, it’s not proprietary but an open spec. Secondly Apple has been using AAC since forever which is a successor to mp3 and an MPEG standard.

View on HN

> The format is ALAC, it’s not proprietary but an open spec

True. No one else bothers with it though, because why should they when FLAC exists? That makes ALAC, in practice, largely an Apple-only format.

To increase interoperability with existing libraries for example. The user group that has some kind of Apple device, and thus potentialy ALAC encoded audio is quite large.

I've been storing my FLAC files as ALAC for iTunes compatibility for the past decade. Max.app on macOS, while old and creaky looking, does a fine job of transcoding them and maintaining tags.

Now imagine storing it in FLAC and playing them everywhere, without having to transcode at all.

That's someone else's windmill to tilt, sorry.

Oh, if you're using homebrew and you want ffmpeg to support ALAC, you can do that. brew edit ffmpeg; add `depends_on "fdk-aac"` and `--enable-libfdk-aac`, `--enable-nonfree` to the relevant sections, remove the bottle section; then, brew reinstall ffmpeg. There's probably a better way to do this that doesn't trigger a merge conflict each time they update the bottle hashes (resolved easily with brew edit ffmpeg, repeat above), but I'm lazy and ffmpeg doesn't update frequently. I have no idea if ffmpeg can maintain ID3 tags from FLAC->ALAC or not, but if you have need of this knowledge someday, say hi to that future for me!

(And if compilation fails with a specific weird error about corefoundation corevideo coreaudio etc, uninstall and reinstall your macOS command line tools, because they're broken; `sudo rm -rf /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools ; xcode-select --install` will do that.)

> There's probably a better way to do this that doesn't trigger a merge conflict

Well if you want to try Nix, https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/9dba669e8a53f00114b53d... right out of the box :D

Though I had read about it already, your comment is the first time I’ve seen a compelling real-word reason for me to install Nix.

That’s what I get for not saying “in Homebrew”!

I mean it was perfectly clear in context. That's why I wrote the "Well..." dependent clause; I know I'm providing the better way for homebrew.

oops "not providing the better way for homebrew." (edit window.)

I wonder why you wouldn't just use ALAC full time? As mentioned in my other comment any decent piece of software or hardware supports ALAC these days.

Sure, if you don't have any use for iTunes or iOS FLAC is the obvious choice, but if you do use iTunes there's really no need to keep two formats around. Just use ALAC.

As mentioned above, ALAC is an open source format, which has all benefits as other open source format e.g. FLAC.

> all benefits as other open source format e.g. FLAC.

Except adoption. FLAC is much more widely supported, so why opt for ALAC?

Because iTunes doesn't support FLAC.

ALAC is open source and you can feel free to contribute to it or "adopt"/use it.Apple has been using ALAC for a long time on difference devices and platform. Moreover, according to Wikipedia, "compared to some other formats, it is not as difficult to decode, making it practical for a limited-power device, such as older iOS devices". "Adoption" is not a reason, from my point of view, ask a company/app abandon an open sourced format to use another one.

That seems to imply that there should only ever be one format for any particular application.

Apple created ALAC as a closed source project after FLAC had already been released as Open Source. They subsequently changed ALACs license to Open Source -- presumably to take advantage of further development from the community.

>ALAC is an open source format, which has all benefits as other open source format e.g. FLAC.

Technically, it's still not as good. For instance, FLAC includes a checksum of the audio data, whereas ALAC doesn't. FLAC also compresses a bit better (=smaller file sizes) and decodes a bit faster (=lower CPU/battery usage).

The main benefit of lossless is the ability to convert to other formats, including other lossless formats that might have better longevity. So as long as you can convert it to FLAC once downloaded it is doing its job.

Yes exactly. And likewise with trying to avoid DRM via some sort of loopback device that is now lossless too.

I can't information theoretically argue for this. But I can algebraically argue lossless conversion rather than storage is great, and this seems great for the war against bad IP legal regimes.

Too bad they are probably only doing this because they feel that with streaming's dominance, the IP regime is not at risk.

My whole collection is stored in ALAC. Any half decent software or hardware player will support ALAC these days.

Surely it's ALAC + FairPlay DRM though, right? Making the actual lossless codec used a moot point.

Yes. Correct me if I'm wrong but I'd be surprised if any of the subscription streaming audio services let you download unencrypted, unencumbered FLAC/lossless files. That would seem to run counter to the whole concept of a subscription pricing model.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com