alac
The Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) is a lossless audio codec developed by Apple and deployed on all of its platforms and devices. (by macosforge)
qaac
CLI QuickTime AAC/ALAC encoder (by nu774)
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alac | qaac | |
---|---|---|
5 | 21 | |
323 | 758 | |
3.7% | - | |
0.0 | 6.0 | |
almost 4 years ago | about 1 month ago | |
C++ | C++ | |
Apache License 2.0 | GNU General Public License v3.0 or later |
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
alac
Posts with mentions or reviews of alac.
We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives
and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-01-29.
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lossless music on the 7th gen
Lastly, ALAC hasn't been updated by apple since 2016. FLAC is actively maintained by xiph.org and saw its last update this past October.
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Upgraded 256GB, 2K battery and trying Rockbox again. You guys have any themes or cool things to try on RB?
Sound quality is the same, but ALAC has poor error correction, no error detection, and hasn't been updated in years. FLAC's last update was three months ago. ALAC's last update was 11 years ago.
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What audio format do you put on your iPods?
ALAC, on the other hand, well... I don't know. I struggled to find an official changelog so who knows? Maybe it was updated recently to include Apple's version of spatial-audio-whatever, but I don't know if that's in the encoder or some other piece of software. Either way, spatial-audio-whatever isn't applicable to iPods and I wouldn't regard it as being part of an encoder's core functionality. ALAC's repository at github shows the last meaningful change was ten years ago. Useful documentation has never been a thing Apple has done, so... meh.
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I got sick of my dongle DAC getting caught and falling off in my pocket, so I designed and printed a bracket to fit perfectly on my phone!
alac is open source and i donβt think they have any proprietary extensions. https://github.com/macosforge/alac
- Airplay shows lossless version is playing
qaac
Posts with mentions or reviews of qaac.
We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives
and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-03-20.
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What does foobar user to transcode from Alac to Flac?
I've been looking around and am still figuring out the perfect solution but alac to flac is possible through a pipe. https://github.com/nu774/qaac/wiki/refalac-usage to convert to wav with specified folder is like this:
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iPod classic and flac??
Second, you will want to install the foobar encoder pack and set up qaac (here's the qaac wiki). In short, apple's AAC/ALAC encoder in iTunes is the best around (better than Nero, Fraunhoefer, ffmpeg, etc) and ensures full compatibility with iPods. But fuck iTunes, you know, for being difficult. So qaac takes the encoder binaries from your installation of iTunes and sets it up as a standalone program which you can use however and wherever you want. So you set up qaac and then tell foobar to use qaac to do all your AAC/ALAC encodings and you get the benefits of apple's encoder without the nonsense of iTunes being uncooperative.
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Is there a way to make an ipod classic support music beyond 48khz and 24 bits?
I use qaac as a CLI wrapper for the iTunes encoder. I don't use foobar, but I'm sure there's the option to set up using an external encoder. Every music manager I've ever used (except iTunes of course) has some way of setting up an external encoder via a command line.
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It's been 84 years
I'm running an ABX test right now between that and a transcode made using qAAC, which is a windows port of Apple's AAC codec. Here is the spectogram of that, as proof.
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AAC 320k is the best "lossy" compromise to FLAC
AAC is still my go-to lossy codec for mobile purposes, although 256kbps is enough for me. it's also worth poiinting out that not all encoders are created equal - Apple's own encoder far superior to FAAC, for example, so Windows or Linux users outside the Apple ecosystem should use qaac instead, as it is a port.
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Help with AAC conversion
On Github click "Releases" on right, or go here - https://github.com/nu774/qaac/releases
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For our ipods, what software you guys use?
Qaac is the best AAC/ALAC solution as it uses apple's own libraries that are included with iTunes. iPods sometimes don't like files that were made with other encoders, so using apple's own libraries ensures the files will play. Setting it up might look intimidating if you aren't familiar with command line input though. Once set up, you can configure Media Monkey, EAC, etc to use qaac as an external encoder.
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audio: how to precisely set desired bitrate/filesize?
By the way, I found a thread from 9 months ago with the same problem, and someone suggested using qaac, which requires Apple software to be installed.
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Solved issues with FLAC to AAC conversion on current iTunes build
QAAC: https://github.com/nu774/qaac/releases/tag/v2.76
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iTunes Alternatives? Foobar2000 does not seem to work anymore
In any case, you'll need to provide the ALAC encoder since it isn't included with either MM or MB, and I'm pretty sure it's the same with the others on that list. Setting up qaac as an external encoder isn't hard, though you do need to follow instructions.
What are some alternatives?
When comparing alac and qaac you can also consider the following projects:
flac - Free Lossless Audio Codec
staxrip - π Video encoding GUI for Windows.
QTFiles - use qaac without installing iTunes
makeportable - Extract components required by qaac from iTunes installer
Cider - A new cross-platform Apple Music experience based on Electron and Vue.js written from scratch with performance in mind. π
picard - A cross-platform music tagger powered by the MusicBrainz database. Picard organizes your music collection by updating your tags, renaming your files, and sorting them into a folder structure, exactly the way you want it.
nvidia-patch - This patch removes restriction on maximum number of simultaneous NVENC video encoding sessions imposed by Nvidia to consumer-grade GPUs.