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Comment by yingbo | Hacker News Reader

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

>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).

> 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.

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.

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