Apple Lossless Audio Codec Becomes Open Source

Apple has officially announced that, as of this week, the Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) is available as an open source project.

The Apple Lossless Encoder was introduced in the Mac OS X Core Audio framework in 2004 together with QuickTime 6.5.1. It was made available in iTunes as of version 4.5 and above. The codec is also implemented in AirPort Express’ implementation of AirPlay.

The new 2011-10-27 entry over at Mac OS forge reads: “The Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) is a lossless audio codec developed by Apple and deployed on all of it's platforms and devices for some years now. Apple is making the Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) available as an open source project.”

The company directs readers to the Apple Lossless Audio Codec project page for more details. There, Apple explains that “The Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) is an audio codec developed by Apple and supported on iPhone, iPad, most iPods, Mac and iTunes.”

Cupertino says that its data compression method reduces the size of audio files but does’t compromise on quality, meaning no information is lost. “A decoded ALAC stream is bit-for-bit identical to the original uncompressed audio file,” Apple confirms.

Those interested in using the format are being told that the Apple Lossless Audio Codec project contains the sources for both the ALAC encoder and the decoder.

An example command line utility, called alacconvert, is also offered to get folks up and running with the basics of reading and writing audio data to/from Core Audio Format (CAF) and WAVE files.

Also included is a description of a 'magic cookie'. You can use this with files based on the ISO base media file format (e.g. MP4 and M4A), according to Apple.

Finally, the Apple Lossless Audio Codec Project page notes that the Apple Lossless Audio Codec sources are available under the Apache license. Those interested in reviewing its terms can visit this address.