For those of you interested in audio compression (so, that'll be Dave then), Apple has released its lossless audio codec to the open source community.

Some will decry this move because 'the shift key is a little too high' (Peter) or 'blah blah Ubuntu blah outdated hardware blah' (Smiffy).

But most of us will release a mighty sigh of 'meh'.

I'll decry it because: Apple still hold the patents and OSing something doesn't negate their ability to continue their recent patent trolling.

That is a most excellent decry Miss Lucy!

I can't say I understand how something can be OS and patented (at least to the point of being licensed), but I can't say I'm that bothered either.

Good luck to you, and all that sail in you.

Software patents are not legal here anyway, so I am not bothered either. Those crazy Americans can do what they like.

YAY, VIVA LA REVOLUTION!

Good for them, and it's better than FLAC in what way?

It comes higher up an alphabetised list.

Wow! I bet the FLAC team are quaking in their boots.

They should be, now that the mighty Apple has entered the giving-away-software-for-free war! I can see it now:

 

FLAC team: "Here take our software, it's free"
Apple: "No, take our software, it's free"
FLAC team: "Not only is our software free, you don't have to pay for it"
Apple: "You don't have to pay for ours, either"
FLAC team: "But ours was free first"
Apple: "But ours comes higher up an alphabetised list"
Rest of the world: "But does it come in a variety of colours?"

I foresee something different:

FLAC team: "Use our codec, it's free"
Most of world: "OK!"
<many, many years later>
Apple: "Use our codec, it's finally free!"
Most of world: "Why should we all stop using FLAC?"
Apple: "Erm.... ours is fruitier?"

The way I see it, the only advantage Apple lossless has is that it's natively supported by iPods. It has the disadvantage that you can't tell from the extension whether a file is a lossless file, or just a big lossy one as both Apple's formats use the same extension (which is a bit stupid). It's also a relatively pointless gesture as the format was reverse engineered yonks ago and open source decoders and encoders already exist for it.

And I think the people who are interested in using Lossless codecs on an iPod will be in the large minority. Even I don't care about Lossless, too large. V0 MP3s are fine by me.

Who actually uses FLAC?

(Genuinely asking)

Presumably it's irrevevant for music cos the majority of stuff is either going to be pirated (in which case it's usually mp3s) or whatever apple supplies it as.

Is it used in games and stuff?

Obsessive audiophiles. On the music private trackers they're big on making sure there is a proper FLAC source for rips.

I wouldn't be surprised if Apple claim they have a patent on giving stuff away free.

Pretty irrelevant then (as a consumer format at least).

Congratulations, the first non-boring answer. You are to be commended, and loved in a manly-not-faggy way.

Yep, I guess they want to appeal to the audiophiles in some way, not that there's any reasonable difference between ALAC and FLAC since they manage the same levels of compression (about 50%) and will obviously sound the same, being lossless an' all.

 

Whereas I guess people could argue between lossy codecs (MP3, AAC, OGG) because there is actually a difference.

Not necessarily. I wouldn't call myself an audiophile, but even I can tell the difference between a 256kbps and lossless file. It depends on the music, of course, and probably even if the lossy track was encoded with VBR (or some other tedious techy thing), but some 256 rips sound 'crushed' in places.

 

So I tend to rip from CD to computer with ALAC (because it's a Mac) and then use the 128 transcoding doobry when synching to iPod. Real audiophiles would probably baulk at that, but frankly if you're listening through earbuds on the train, anything else is just pointless.

If you can tell the difference between 256kbps and lossless then you are an audiophile.

I definitely can't. Most of my meagre mp3 collection is in 128k or even probably 64k in places. I don't care about music quality, so long as I can hear it. Same with videos.

And I think that's where most consumers are.

But really I was talking about the market. The majority of music is either pirated (and thus in the vast majority of cases mp3) or downloaded via itunes and thus... whatever format they use (AAC?).

FLAC doesn't even come into it at the consumer level.

I suppose to an extent it does depend on your audio equipment. What do you usually listen to music through?

 

I can tell the difference between lower bitrate MP3s and V0 but not sure I'd be able to tell the difference between V0 and FLAC.

 

Video on the other hand I'm more picky. I hate poor quality video, or more so, video that should be better but isn't. I don't mind a mobile phone video being low quality, since that's the format/style.

 

I think my biggest gripe is with ITV Player online. Their catchup service is a shocking quality whereas I think the quality on BBC iPlayer is really quite good, and they even offer HD streams in places.