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Irrelevant is a strong word, and I very much doubt it. The only reason for making this open source was for devices to be able to support this more. However FLAC

Irrelevant is a strong word, and I very much doubt it. The only reason for making this open source was for devices to be able to support this more. However FLAC has been open source for quite a while - consequently most device makers willing to make the effort to support loss-less audio codec already did so with FLAC. Support for ALAC will mostly come for these devices. Conversely, I see no reason for any device to support ALAC and not FLAC. According to Wikipedia, FLAC is more efficient in encoding/decoding speeds - with same compression ratio. This translates to it being more power efficient. Lastly this news will matter to only a few audiophiles who are also Apple geeks. Making something open source is a welcome gesture, but I hope Apple will do this for other items which will have better reaching consequences.

sandGorgon 15y ago
Conversely, I see no reason for any device to support ALAC and not FLAC. Isnt this implemented in silicon (or atleast implemented as some DSP-specific library) ? AFAIK that costs money. Today, if you wanted a lossless player, that player had to have FLAC - which was taken from a commercial vendor like Tensilica [1]. But now that ALAC is an alternative, why would I even try to spend more money and also add FLAC ? Plus, it is reasonably trivial to convert all FLAC to ALAC [2] [1] http://www.tensilica.com/products/audio/audio-codecs/flac.htm http://www.tensilica.com/products/audio/audio-codecs/flac.ht... or http://www.tensilica.com/products/audio/audio-codecs.htm http://www.tensilica.com/products/audio/audio-codecs.htm (no ALAC) [2] http://www.dbpoweramp.com/dmc.htm http://www.dbpoweramp.com/dmc.htm