ALAC Open Sourced

[JonathanHull]

http://apple.slashdot.org/story/11/10/28/0115247/apples-lossless-audio-codec-alac-now-open-source

http://alac.macosforge.org/

Under Apache license which AFAIK is GPL compatible.

Rockbox already has a decoder for ALAC, but I figured this would be worth looking at anyway to see how it compares.

[saratoga]

Cpp and no assembly.

[gbl08ma]

That means our decoder is more suited for portable players than Apple's one, right?

[Sudos]

This is something else I just wondered. I saw the news via Google and immediately rushed here to see what was being discussed about it. doesn't seem like much.

This would be something I'd like to see about, since I recently considered dropping my entire collection into ALAC from CD and am considering a bigger drive for my iPod to fit it all.

[saratoga]

This is something else I just wondered. I saw the news via Google and immediately rushed here to see what was being discussed about it. doesn't seem like much.

This would be something I'd like to see about, since I recently considered dropping my entire collection into ALAC from CD and am considering a bigger drive for my iPod to fit it all.

ALAC was reverse engineered many years ago.  This isn't really useful except for people who didn't like the license terms on previous open source ALAC decoders.

[markun]

ffmpeg's Mike Melanson has something to say about it:

http://multimedia.cx/eggs/alac-open-sourced/