GSoC Showcase: ALAC | Breaking Eggs And Making Omelettes

For his FFmpeg Summer of Code project, Jai Menon successfully completed an encoder for the Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC). As you can see, Jai’s encoder is competitive with Apple’s iTunes, as well as dBpoweramp, another program that implements an ALAC encoder:

Thanks to Benjamin Larsson for setting up the graph. We’re rooting for the cyan bar to be the lowest one of each bar quartet. The code is already in the mainline tree.

The 13 samples I used for this test come from the OpenMusic CD and showcase a reasonable diversity of genres. The raw rips are available here.

4 thoughts on “GSoC Showcase: ALAC”

Steve August 30, 2008 at 9:15 pm

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1175664#post1175664

It seems to be doing pretty well here.

Jai Menon August 30, 2008 at 10:57 pm

Steve Says:
August 30th, 2008 at 9:15 pm

>It seems to be doing pretty well here.

Thanks for the link Steve. Its nice to know that it is being tested
heavily! I’ll await bug reports if any :-)

Dom October 31, 2011 at 9:36 am

any plans to update this graph with results from the newly opensource ALAC encoder from Apple? http://alac.macosforge.org/

Multimedia Mike Post authorOctober 31, 2011 at 2:24 pm

@Dom: I could. Honestly, I was planning to create a new post arguing that encoding speed isn’t really an important trade-off in this case. The fact that it’s officially open source should support its use case vs. FLAC or others, regardless of which encoder is used.

Comments are closed.