ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec) support in faad

[poetnerd]

The Logitech Media Server uses a fork of faad 2.7 that contains support for parsing Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) format. Unfortunately that support was never submitted upstream.

Is there interest in adding ALAC support to faad?

Although the mp4 parser rewrite means that the original mods to add ALAC support cannot be integrated as-is, if adding ALAC support is a direction the faad2 maintainers think is a good one, I'd be willing to help get the changes rewritten to work with the current version.

[fabiangreffrath]

Sorry for the late reply. Faad2 is actually unmaintained. I am the last one left with commit rights, but I don't have much expertise in the code. So, all I can say is "why not?". 😉

[eustas]

Wikipedia says "ALAC is not a variant of AAC (which is a lossy format), but rather an unrelated lossless format that uses linear prediction (similar to other lossless codecs)."

Indeed, links from apple point to https://github.com/macosforge/alac.git

Brief search in https://github.com/Logitech/slimserver shows that they use both faad and alac binaries.

As discussed in other issue, perhaps it is better to look into other project that would cover mp4 format in all the details and relay actual decoding to libfaad, libalac, etc.

I propose to close this issue as a non-goal.

[fabiangreffrath]

Alright, thank you.