ALAC 0.1

Although an encoder is not provided, by using the decoder as a sort of specification it should be fairly trivial to write an encoder. By exploiting other lossless audio encoders, such as FLAC, the task will be much easier. Although one wouldn't be able to copy the compression algorithms verbatim, as adaptive compression is used in ALAC and not in FLAC. There are, however, a bunch of academic papers on the issue.

The program located here will not be able to handle all ALAC files, it can only handle mono or stereo files. ALAC allows up to 8 channels. It should be trivial to finish the implementation once I find files that I can test it with. Likewise the decoder only supports 16bit sample sizes. Again, it should be trivial to fix.

The decoder is fairly self-explanatory, it can read an ALAC stream from either a file or from stdin, and write it as raw PCM data or as a WAV file to either stdout or a file. In theory one should be able to stream data to the decoder.

• Mac OS X 10.2 or later.