ALAC

Apple Lossless Audio Codec

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Filename extension(s)	.m4a, .caf
Media type
Developed by	Apple Inc.
Initial release
Latest release
Type of format	Lossless audio codec
Container for
Contained by	MPEG-4 Part 14
Extended from
Extended to
Standard
Open format?
Website

Apple Lossless (also known as Apple Lossless Encoder, ALE, or Apple Lossless Audio Codec, ALAC) is a lossless audio codec developed by Apple Computer.

Description

Apple Lossless data is stored within an MP4 or MOV container with the filename extensions .m4a or .mov. It is not a variant of AAC, but a totally new codec. Apple iPods with a dock connector and recent firmware can play Apple Lossless encoded files. It does not utilize any DRM scheme, but by the nature of the container, it is thought that DRM can be applied to ALAC much the same way it can with other files in QuickTime containers.

Apple claims that audio files compressed with its lossless codec will use up "about half the storage space" that the uncompressed data would require.

The Apple Lossless Encoder was introduced as a component of QuickTime 6.5.1 on April 28, 2004, and thus as a feature of Apple iTunes 4.5. The codec is also used in the AirPort Express's AirTunes implementation.

David Hammerton and Cody Brocious have analyzed and reverse-engineered this codec without any documents on the format. On March 5, 2005, Hammerton published a simple open source decoder in the C programming language on the basis of their work.

Player support

Hardware

• Apple iPod
• iRiver iHP-120/iHP-140 with the open source Rockbox firmware
• FiiO X1/X3/X5

Software

• iTunes
• QuickTime
• dBpoweramp
• foobar2000
• XMplay
• CUETools

See also

• Lossless comparison by Rjamorim

External links

• Apple Lossless Audio Codec at macOS forge
• alac on GitHub
• iTunes for Windows: Choose import settings
• Open Source Decoder
• Apple Lossless on Wikipedia