Apple has recently made its audio codec (Apple Lossless Audio Codec) used for its iOS devices Open Source under the Apache License 2.0. The project is hosted on Apple’s MacOSForge.Org website along with other software projects like MacBuild and MacRuby from Apple . ALAC helps reduce the size of media files without the loss of the information.
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
The Apple Lossless Audio Codec Open Source project is hosted at:
http://alac.macosforge.org/
Check out the wiki and timeline for more information and to track developments on the project.
