ALAC

File Format
Name	ALAC
Ontology	Electronic File Formats Audio and Music ALAC
Extension(s)	.m4a
PRONOM	fmt/596
Released	2004-04-28

Description

Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) was developed by Apple to deliver lossless audio compression, with the data being stored in an MP4 container. The format was open-sourced by Apple in 2011.

Information

• Apple Lossless encoder & decoder source
• An earlier decoder, based on reverse-engineering

Software

ALAC-encoded files are playable using Apple's iTunes media player. Applications using the open-source libavcodec can also playback and otherwise manipulate ALAC-encoded files. For a list of such applications, see here.

Windows and MacOS PowerPC compiles of the reverse-engineered ALAC decoder v0.1.3 can be found here

• Konvertor

Links

• Apple Lossless Audio Codec Project