Apple Lossless Encoder Explained
There are hundreds of audio/video codecs available and so many are being developed every now and then, making it very difficult for the people to decide the best among them. Every codec whether lossy or lossless has some unique features and some advantages, which make it, appear better than the other does. In reality, you can select a codec depending on your requirements. To compare lossless audio compressors/lossy audio compressors, not only performance but also many things need to be considered. You have to take into account some factors like encoding speed, decoding speed, flexibility, compression, tagging, error handling,hardware support, software support and many other factors. None of the audio compressors do well in every way. So depending on the requirements say, you need fastest decoding capacity then you can opt for ALAC, if you want multiple operating system compatibility, you can opt for FLAC or if you want highest compression ratio, then you can go for optimFrog. Apple Inc. developed ALAC to be used by AirPort Express and iPod. The extension of file is .M4A and the lossless data is stored in MPEG -4 container.

The advantages and disadvantages of ALAC are as follows:

• 1. The encoding speed is average but the decoding speed is excellent.
• 2. Compression ratio ranges from 40%-60%.It is not the best among the lossless compressors.
• 3. The amount of encoding choices offered to the users is very less. ALAC is not flexible.
• 4. QuickTime tagging format is used. This supports UTF-8(Unicode characters) but the maximum length of any tag value cannot exceed 255 characters.
• 5. ALAC provides good support for hardware iPod and airport express.
• 6. It offers very little software support.
• 7. This compressor does not provide a hybrid or lossy mode.
• 8. Streaming is possible.
• 9. Decoding is open source but encoding is not.
• 10. Multi Channel audio is supported.
• 11. ALAC Works on windows and Mac.
• 12. ALAC provides high-resolution support.
• 13. File can be contained in MPEG-4 container.
• 14. Apple iTunes and dBpoweramp Music converter are the only two applications that encode and rip CDS to M4A.
• 15. ALAC is supported by Apple iPod and iRiver iHP-120/iHP-140 Rockbox firmware.
• 16. Supports software iTunes, QuickTime, dbPowerAMP ,foobar2000 and XMplay