• WolfLink
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    1 month ago

    Apple made ALAC as an alternative to FLAC due to the dubious licensing around FLAC at the time.

    • 2xsaiko@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 month ago

      Interesting. I can’t find anything about the FLAC licensing issues. Do you have a link?

      (Also, correction — Wikipedia says macOS in general can play FLAC. I guess it’s just the Music app that can’t import them.)

      • WolfLink
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        1 month ago

        I’m really not sure where I originally read it. I did some digging and I found some discussion about FLAC and patent trolls on a few forums, including the Talk page of the Wikipedia article, but I haven’t found anything concrete.

        It might be that the patent troll thing was just a rumor!

      • WolfLink
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        1 month ago

        Yes they are no longer scared of the licensing enough most modern Apple devices do have at least some FLAC support.

        Also ALAC is a free and open source codec which also has wide support.

        And with a tool like FFMPEG you can easily convert between the two and they are both lossless so there is no data lost in the conversion.

        So really just use whichever you like it really doesn’t matter.

        • Aatube@kbin.melroy.org
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          1 month ago

          since you seem to be knowledgeable about this, i wanna ask: do you think one should use .opus or .ogg as the file extension for OPUS files?

          • WolfLink
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            1 month ago

            I think both work since opus is the codec but ogg is the container, but personally I’d probably go with .opus because it’s more descriptive.

            Btw Apple’s ALAC and AAC files are typically stored in an mp4 container but with the m4a extension to mark it as intended to be audio only (although it may have a video track, which usually is used for album art).