On Wed, Nov 16, 2011 at 03:36:12PM -0800, [email protected] wrote: > > This will leave Apple with even less reasons to support FLAC ... > > You make some important observations, but I do not see how anything > can be done by the FLAC team about Apple's lack of support.
I think that only people who work for Apple can do anything to persuade Apple to (ahem) think different about FLAC. I'm guessing there is a strong "Not Invented Here" effect at work. > As for FLAC, no news is good news. That means the code is stable and > bug free. I appreciate that, a lot. That's why I run mostly Debian or Ubuntu LTS on machines that need to be stable (but don't need to have the latest fancy stuff). Unfortunately, most people tend to prefer the latest fancy stuff (in devices and installed software) so for those people lack of change is usually seen as a bad thing. Although having said that, last time I had to install FLAC on a Windows PC (someone else's) the GUI front-end that I downloaded came with an older flac.exe than the current FLAC version at the time. > It seems that all of the recent updates have been efforts to port > FLAC to operating systems like Windows and Linux. In terms of your > comments above, Windows/Linux support does absolutely nothing to help > FLAC compete against ALAC on the OSX platform. Not directly, no... ...but most people like New Stuff as opposed to not fixing something that isn't broken. Enough to cause more interest in Apple Lossless as a supported format (outside of Apple devices) and therefore less interest in FLAC. It could even cause some music download sites to reconsider their support of FLAC. > It is indeed noteworthy that Apple has released the source for ALAC. > The power of FLAC is that it was designed for embedded systems from > the beginning, and that's why you see portable recorders like the > Sound Devices 700 Series supporting FLAC, as well as various optical > disc players (CD, DVD, etc.). One question that remains for me is > whether Apple's ALAC open source can be ported to these kinds of > embedded systems with the same ease. I wish I could afford a portable recorder from Sound Devices! They record multichannel or stereo in FLAC aswell as playing it, right? Obviously, FLAC requires much less horsepower to decode than to encode, and that's OK (for most uses) because the decode will happen more often. I can live with uncompressed recording, but when buying hardware, FLAC support is always a deciding factor. However, almost every device that can play audio (from el-cheapo DVD players, to almost every "pro" DJ or broadcast deck) is able to play MP3 files. Most of them can also play WMA and AAC (lossy), but FLAC support on mass-market devices is rare. There is such a huge variety of chipsets and other hardware elements that it's impractical to port Rockbox to them. For example, OPPO do some very nice DVD and BD players for the home theatre and audiophile markets. But only their top-range players can play FLAC files. That is according to their own website, but it may be a "hidden extra". Similarly, CD DJ decks from Pioneer and Denon seem to support every lossy compressed audio format, but not lossless. And to make it even worse, Silvio Zeppieri (Denon brand manager) commented on www.denondjforums.com (in Feb 2010) that their reason for not supporting FLAC was that hard drives are cheap now, so just use WAV for "lossless" instead, as it would cost Denon too much to develop FLAC support. FolderPlay (app for Nokia S60) is what I listen to music with on the move every day (mostly FLAC, some MP3) and the developer told me that it took him half a day to add FLAC support. Whereas Denon were afraid that the DJ features (scratch, loop in/out points, etc) that are already possible on Denon hardware in WAV, will cost them too much development time to support in FLAC. What impressed me most about the discussion on www.denondjforums.com wasn't the overall defeatist attitude from a Denon manager (he said "no direct FLAC sales" in Feb 2010), but that most of the other people on the forum agreed that hard drives are so cheap that lossless has no real advantage: digital DJs should either use MP3s (not caring about sound quality) or WAV (not caring about storage space). And now we find ourselves in a world where hard drives are suddenly not cheap anymore... -- -Dec. --- "Mosaic is going to be on every computer in the world." - Marc Andreessen, 1994 _______________________________________________ Flac-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xiph.org/mailman/listinfo/flac-dev
