[No] Apple Lossless Audio Codec Support

[Kinsie]

Apple just released their lossless codec as an open source project under the Apache license. Personally I'll continue using WAVs and tracker stuff so this doesn't really affect me, but if this is easily implementable and doesn't bloat the executable size too much it might be a decent addition to sit along-side FLAC support.

[DaMan]

Making a batch file that converts ALAC to WAV to FLAC would be even easier for the 5 people that use ALAC.

[Kinsie]

Well, yeah, I just thought I'd throw this out there while it's fresh.

[Blox]

It'd be interesting if AAC support was possible.
Though what do I have to say, I don't play this anyway. !

If questions arise, then I'm dropping this because AAC is better than AC3, which is > OGG >=< MP3.
So yeah, just dropping this by because why not. (Honestly!)

[Graf Zahl]

AAC - never going to happen. Patent issues are a tricky thing and the best way to avoid them is not using patented technology.

[randi]

ALAC: Unless it can be compressed significantly better than FLAC, it doesn't offer anything that FLAC doesn't.
AAC: As Graf said, it's patented, so somebody's going to need to pay that license fee. (Technically, you also need to be paying a MP3 fee, too, if you distribute wads with MP3s.) Vorbis is supposed to subjectively be about the same quality as AAC at the same bitrate.
AC3: This has license fees, just like AAC. Also, my understanding is that at low bitrates, it isn't very good.

[Kinsie]

Fair enough. Thanks for the explanations, guys.

[NeuralStunner]

(Technically, you also need to be paying a MP3 fee, too, if you distribute wads with MP3s.)

Well that's really LAME. (I don't think the quality is as nice as OGG, anyway.)

[DaMan]

AC3 is worse than MP3 'nuff said.
AAC-LC and Ogg are about the same but AAC-HE can do "good enough" quality at 48-64Kbps. There is the ol' host binaries in a country that doesn't recognize software patents loophole.
A few lossless codecs compress better but they're all closed source.

[Graf Zahl]

That list makes me wonder why some companies have to reinvent the wheel over and over again. Since all of these codes are nearly identical in terms of compression, what's the point in developing yet another one instead of just using one that fits the intended use?

Well, anyway, looks like ALAC isn't really worth bothering...

[Ryan Cordell]

For the (or loss of) money and people that don't know any better, probably.

[Blzut3]

Probably for the same reason OGG Vorbis+Theora didn't become the standard for HTML5 video. Fear of submarine patents on the free and open source codecs.

[DaMan]

Mostly because Theora is crap. No website is going to pay for the extra bandwidth it would need just to make a few Mozilla devs happy.

That list makes me wonder why some companies have to reinvent the wheel over and over again. Since all of these codes are nearly identical in terms of compression, what's the point in developing yet another one instead of just using one that fits the intended use?

Most of those lossless codecs were made by individuals. Apple,Real and WMA lossless were probably a case of Not Invented Here.

[Blzut3]

Mostly because Theora is crap. No website is going to pay for the extra bandwidth it would need just to make a few Mozilla devs happy.

On the contrary Apple and Microsoft made it quite clear that it was mainly out of fear of submarine patents. Sure quality was a factor, but it's not the reason that Safari and IE don't support it. (See paragraph 4.) In addition, if I'm not mistaken, Theora's quality is somewhere between h263 and h264. h263 was, at one point, good enough for Youtube.

Now we have VP8 which competes with h264 and licensed for free by Google. Why Apple/Microsoft continue to refuse these I don't really know. There were some suspicions that VP8 might infringe on h264 patents though.

[Graf Zahl]

Mostly because Theora is crap. No website is going to pay for the extra bandwidth it would need just to make a few Mozilla devs happy.

On the contrary Apple and Microsoft made it quite clear that it was mainly out of fear of submarine patents. Sure quality was a factor, but it's not the reason that Safari and IE don't support it. (See paragraph 4.) In addition, if I'm not mistaken, Theora's quality is somewhere between h263 and h264. h263 was, at one point, good enough for Youtube.

The entire reasoning is still bogus. It sounds to me more like some companies want to keep control no matter what and use any pretext they can to justify it. It also has the (for them) nice side effect to devalue the free alternative by spreading FUD.