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Comment by gtrak | Hacker News Reader

What's the point of this over flac?

It allows you to play lossless audio on the combined 400 million(1) iPods and iOS devices out there.

(1)http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/04/apple-lawsuit-reve...

Well, FLAC already can be played in the millions of Android phones out there. I don't see the point in having two different formats, it will just make worse for the consumer who want to change from one platform to another. I bought a lot of FLAC music and it is a shame that I can only listen it on my Android phone and not on my iPod.

Been hunting around, but does anyone know the first ipod to support it?

I'm not familiar with the current state of FLAC but as of a few years ago ALAC offered better meta-data in the MP4 container. Part of the reason I abandoned FLAC years ago was constant problems with meta-data. I would often end up corrupt files post-tagging or the player would simply not show meta-data I had meticulously added to my bootleg collection. I got the sense at the time that there was a lack of agreement on how meta-data was supposed to work in FLAC files.

Afaik FLAC this days uses an ogg container, which is where the metadata goes, so support should be as good as for Ogg Vorbis.

In practical terms, I have a huge collection of FLAC, and never had trouble with metadata, sounds like a bug in whatever player you were using.

Note to uriel: your last few posts are all [dead] for some reason.

  uriel 2 hours ago | link [dead]

  Afaik FLAC this days uses an ogg container, which is where
  the metadata goes, so support should be as good as for Ogg
  Vorbis.

  In practical terms, I have a huge collection of FLAC, and
  never had trouble with metadata, sounds like a bug in
  whatever player you were using.

The Ogg container is optional, and I can't say I've seen it used much, if ever - I gather its main use was for streaming. FLAC has its own metadata as part of the spec: http://flac.sourceforge.net/format.html#metadata_block

It plays on iPods and other iOS devices. Other than that, not much -- FLAC's compression ratio is a bit better on average, and more non-Apple devices support it.

The release of this code isn't really all that exciting, as there's already a free reverse-engineered implementation in libav. (It might not support all the modes described in this source release, though.)

he means ffmpeg

ffmpeg renamed themselves to libav

No they didn't. FFmpeg still exists. It is still active with plenty of contributions.

http://lwn.net/Articles/433347/

What does that show? The people who forked it decided to change the name of their fork.

iTunes does not support FLAC.

Dedicated playback hardware on iOS devices.

consumer products that actually support it?

Android market has had at least one FLAC player for at least 2 years now

I have had something like this for 3 years:

http://www.logitech.com/en-au/speakers-audio/wireless-music-...

FLAC has been supported by Rockbox http://www.rockbox.org/ since 2005.. I remember using it in my iriver H300, iPods were supported as well

well yeah, decoders exist. Rockbox doesn't qualify as a "consumer product" in the sense I was using the term. IE, walk into my local electronics store and pick up a device and take it to the till. Good point (to the other poster) about the squeezebox though, quite correct.

In addition to iOS playback as mentioned by other posters, ALAC is also used when streaming AirPlay audio. I would have killed for this code a few years ago.

iDevices don't support FLAC, IIRC.

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