David Hammerton reports that he has successfully reverse engineered Apple’s custom proprietary lossless audio codec which goes by the fourcc ‘alac’. Source code is here. Hopefully, it will be integrated into FFmpeg in short order and be accessible to all libavcodec-using programs.

And– would you believe it?– it looks an awful lot like other lossless audio codecs in terms of underlying algorithms.

Update, early, early on March 6: It took me the better part of March 5, but ALAC is in FFmpeg’s libavcodec and ready for all the programs that depend on libavcodec.