Apple Lossless Audio Codec Now Open-Source

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Apple has recently open-sourced its ALAC or Apple Lossless Audio Codec, which means app developers can now support the codec on their apps. Audiophiles can also now enjoy the use of Apple’s lossless compression for playing high-fidelity music and audio on Apple hardware.

Apple has recently announced that the Apple Lossless Audio Codec — or ALAC — is now released under the Apache license, and is now avaialble for developers to build on, and that derivative works can be distributed and redistributed with our without the same licensing terms. With the open-sourcing of ALAC, developers can now build apps that run audio files encoded in this lossless format.

Previously, only iTunes on Mac OS X and all of Apple’s portable devices (iPods, iPads, iPhones) support the format, which reduces file sizes to 40 to 60% of their original size without any discernable loss in audio quality or fidelity. This is simliar to the open-source Free and Lossless Audio Compression (FLAC) popular among audiophiles. However, FLAC does not work on iTunes, and devices like the iPod, iPad and iPhone cannot play back FLAC files.

The open-sourcing of ALAC opens up the possibility of playing ALAC-compressed audio on non-Apple hardware. This also gives audiophiles the ability to save their lossless audio on Apple devices, which makes it easier to share lossless audio among users with Apple iDevices.

The ALAC project includes alacconvert, a command-line utility that can read and write data from and to WAV and CAF files, as well as media files used by portable devices like MP3 and M4A.