Apple's Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) Now Open Source

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday October 27, @10:20PM
from the free-music dept.

Revotron writes "Apple has released the full source to their Apple Lossless Audio Codec under the Apache license. The Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) is a lossless audio codec developed by Apple and deployed on all of its platforms and devices over the last 10 years. Could the release of the ALAC source code mark a possible first step in opening up more of the iOS platform?"

Welcome to the Apple Lossless Audio Codec Project

2011-10-27

The Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) is an audio codec developed by Apple and supported on iPhone, iPad, most iPods, Mac and iTunes.  ALAC is a data compression method which reduces the size of audio files with no loss of information.  A decoded ALAC stream is bit-for-bit identical to the original uncompressed audio file.

The Apple Lossless Audio Codec project contains the sources for the ALAC encoder and decoder.  Also included is an example command line utility, called alacconvert, to read and write audio data to/from Core Audio Format (CAF) and WAVE files.  A description of a 'magic cookie' for use with files based on the ISO base media file format (e.g. MP4 and M4A) is included as well.

The Apple Lossless Audio Codec sources are available under the Apache license.  Details can be found here http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.

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