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Topic: Apple IOS 11 to support FLAC (Read 22964 times) previous topic - next topic
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Re: Apple IOS 11 to support FLAC

Reply #1
Quote
iOS 11 lets you play FLAC audio files straight from your iPad and iPhone
~ https://thenextweb.com/apple/2017/06/06/ios-11-flac :)

This is ages so late it's laughable.  Guess they've thrown in the towel on their own lossless format (which is a good thing anyway).

Just wait for the iCrowd to think it's greatest innovation yet to come from Apple...   ::)

Re: Apple IOS 11 to support FLAC

Reply #2
Maybe they had to now that flac'd MQA takes over the world.
Is troll-adiposity coming from feederism?
With 24bit music you can listen to silence much louder!

Re: Apple IOS 11 to support FLAC

Reply #3
This is ages so late it's laughable.  Guess they've thrown in the towel on their own lossless format (which is a good thing anyway).

*googling* it is only two years and a half after Microsoft announced FLAC support in Windows 10.

It still seems to me that ALAC has a little bit of dying left to do until it can finally claim to have taken the "new WMAL" title ;-)

Re: Apple IOS 11 to support FLAC

Reply #4
Until they add FLAC support in iTunes or in iPods...  I could really care less.  Far too behind the times..
JXL

Re: Apple IOS 11 to support FLAC

Reply #5
Well, if iOS 11 is going to support FLAC natively, I think that iPods and iTunes will support it.  I wonder if Apple is planning to roll out a "high res" music sales offering and this is prep work for it.  Vorbis comments could easily handle all that personally identifiable metadata that Apple embeds in their purchases.

Re: Apple IOS 11 to support FLAC

Reply #6
Vorbis comments could easily handle all that personally identifiable metadata that Apple embeds in their purchases.
There are many applications that would display (and thus make it easy to delete) those tags. Bot not even Apple will put in there some COMMENT ITUNES longandstupidstringwithallyourpersonaldetailsencrypted which includes so vital information (e.g., EQ or MQA flags or ...) that you lose fidelity if you delete it? And use that as an excuse to ban tagging applications from App Store?

Re: Apple IOS 11 to support FLAC

Reply #7
Vorbis comments could easily handle all that personally identifiable metadata that Apple embeds in their purchases.
There are many applications that would display (and thus make it easy to delete) those tags. Bot not even Apple will put in there some COMMENT ITUNES longandstupidstringwithallyourpersonaldetailsencrypted which includes so vital information (e.g., EQ or MQA flags or ...) that you lose fidelity if you delete it? And use that as an excuse to ban tagging applications from App Store?

I don't see Apple every going down the MQA path.  They'll roll their own technology before they license MQA.

I know utilities that will happily scrub your iTunes purchases of all identifying information.  All the extra stuff now is just stores in MP4 ATOMS.

Re: Apple IOS 11 to support FLAC

Reply #8
I don't see Apple every going down the MQA path.  They'll roll their own technology before they license MQA.
Maybe it is more about playing high bitrate releases at all in the near future. Imagine some labels discontinue the typical high bitrate formats and only offer MQA.
Is troll-adiposity coming from feederism?
With 24bit music you can listen to silence much louder!

Re: Apple IOS 11 to support FLAC

Reply #9
I don't see Apple every going down the MQA path.  They'll roll their own technology before they license MQA.
Maybe it is more about playing high bitrate releases at all in the near future. Imagine some labels discontinue the typical high bitrate formats and only offer MQA.

If they're planning to offer high bitrate in MQA only format, more power to them.  Would you like more snake oil with the snake oil I served you?  :-)

As long as I can continue to buy 16/44.1 losless files, I'm good.  I mostly buy CDs these days and rip them.

With all the loudness wars crap going on, I'm waiting for labels to start offering an "original masters" series and start releasing songs from the 60s through the 90s in their original higher dynamic range masters.

It's all about repackaging the music they already have so you can buy it from them again.

Re: Apple IOS 11 to support FLAC

Reply #10
With all the loudness wars crap going on, I'm waiting for labels to start offering an "original masters" series and start releasing songs from the 60s through the 90s in their original higher dynamic range masters.

It's all about repackaging the music they already have so you can buy it from them again.

Before that happens i bet you will get authenticated 16/44.1 MQA.
Is troll-adiposity coming from feederism?
With 24bit music you can listen to silence much louder!

 

Re: Apple IOS 11 to support FLAC

Reply #12
Collecting bits:

- Yep, there are utilities that will clean away iTunes' MP4 atoms, but you need to know about them (up til the fb2k Tag Sanitizer I hardly knew any that was not a major hassle). Now it will be in plain sight for more or less any tagger.

-  MQA works just as well (or just as bad) with ALAC as with FLAC, so that shouldn't be the issue. Unless the snakeoil industry has decided to demand FLAC ... for whatever reason. There are a couple of good reasons to choose FLAC over ALAC generally, but I can only see one reason that the industry could consider crucial, and that is that people cannot tell AAC in .m4a from ALAC in .m4a, and you would not want your customers to perceive MQA as lossy, would you? ;)

- Selling you full-DR mixes? Un-re-masters? 23 "Full dynamic range edition" hits here: https://earache.bandcamp.com/music . Most are actually the original CD master, however there is at least one exception where the original US/European CD was cramped as well.

Re: Apple IOS 11 to support FLAC

Reply #13
I'm waiting for record labels to catch on to DR values and start making high DR releases with an actual sticker on the digipack/jewelcase that says "DR 15!!"

Of course they'll cost twice as much as the regular releases and be labeled "audiophile."

Kind of like Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs or Audio Fidelity, except released directly by the record labels.

I think the only appeal for FLAC is that the format has appeal in audiophile circles.  There are lots of placebophiles that are clueless about  different lossless formats.  All they know is that FLAC is best and the difference between FLAC and MP3 is "so obvious."  You could sell a 24/192 wavpack file and they'll argue that it can't be as good as FLAC.

Hell there are audiophiles that swear up and down that they can hear a difference between a FLAC and a WAV file.

I would love it if my iPhone could play every imaginable format: FLAC Wavpack, Ogg Vorbis, AAC, MP3, ALAC, WAV, Opus.  Make the iPhone/iPod the universal music player.

Re: Apple IOS 11 to support FLAC

Reply #14
I think the only appeal for FLAC is that the format has appeal in audiophile circles.  There are lots of placebophiles that are clueless about  different lossless formats.  All they know is that FLAC is best and the difference between FLAC and MP3 is "so obvious."  You could sell a 24/192 wavpack file and they'll argue that it can't be as good as FLAC.

Hell there are audiophiles that swear up and down that they can hear a difference between a FLAC and a WAV file.

And then they "prefer" WAV ... or AIFF! https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,113970.0.html

So I guess Apple supports FLAC in order to enable people to play their purchases, and then this is likely a sign that Apple has decided there will be no ALAC download sales in iTunes.

Re: Apple IOS 11 to support FLAC

Reply #15
A lot of Apple's sales practices in music are dictated by the record labels, who have tried for years to break Apple grip on digital music.  The record labels HATED Apple's US$0.99 price per track.  They wanted to charge more for new releases and hit singles.

When DRM stated to melt away, Apple was the LAST of the digital music sales companies to remove it, because the record labels wouldn't let them.  What is interesting is that Apple is the only online music sales company that managed to remove DRM without customers losing their music.  When MSN Music and Walmart switched to MP3, customers lost all access to their music when the WMA DRM servers were taken offline by those companies.  Apple. instead offered an "upgrade" to DRM free music for a small fee per track.  As part of the upgrade, you went from 128k AAC to 256K AAC.  Brilliant marketing strategy on their part.  Lets you keep your music, and the upgrade to 256K AAC makes you feel like you're getting something for your money.

As for ALAC, I'm sure Apple developed it in the hopes of selling lossless music, and the record labels simply never gave them permission to sell lossless files.  I believe ALAC supports Apple's FairPlay DRM.

I think in 2017 formats matter, at least to the consumer.  FLAC is perceived as "high quality," and Apple may have trouble selling flies in losless format if they just call them lossless of ALAC.

Re: Apple IOS 11 to support FLAC

Reply #16
Apple appears to have given up on ALAC years ago. They published the documentation some time ago so the community could implement their own versions but I don't see Apple push it any more.

Don't forget, ALAC was originally created because in those days (some fifteen years ago) there were some fears around submarine patents around FLAC*. The theory was that the holders of those patents were waiting for a company with deep pockets to implement FLAC so they could then approach them for royalties. Considering various big companies have started to use FLAC without getting sued we can safely say that those fears turn out to be unfounded.

Knowing this, I see no reason why Apple would not make FLAC a first class citizen on its platforms now.

* If you search back far enough here on HA there is a post from Josh Coalson where he says that Apple approached him to use FLAC on OS X but that Josh was not prepared to sign their customary NDA. Apple came out with ALAC some time later.
Every night with my star friends / We eat caviar and drink champagne
Sniffing in the VIP area / We talk about Frank Sinatra
Do you know Frank Sinatra? / He's dead

Re: Apple IOS 11 to support FLAC

Reply #17
Well, certain entities like MPEG-LA are always looking for ways to squeeze people for money.  When Google release VP-8 and claimed it did not infringe on MPEG patents, MPEG-LA immediately created a license to cover people that wanted to use VP-8 just in case something came up when MPEG-LA reviewed the code.

Same thing is going on with Xiph's daala video codec.  To avoid patents, Xiph basically started from scratch, rather than build on previous video codecs, and it looks like they may have come up with something better h.264 or even h.265.  Of course MPEG-LA is all over it now.  They're watching daala like a hawk, making sure that something isn't infringed upon.

That's kind of what scares me about Opus.  Xiph fully admits that Opus is patent encumbered.  And they say they got the patent holders to give royalty free licenses.  Unless those licenses are  granted in perpituity, I'd be a little worried.


Re: Apple IOS 11 to support FLAC

Reply #19
Now if only Opus could catch on.  Especially over things like A2DP where latency is an issue.  It seems most phones (and MacOS) are able to compensate for the latency introduced by using AAC and MP3 over A2DP.  Windows however, fails miserably, which is why a lot of people choose AptX on Windows.

But back on topic I wonder how long before we see "hi-res" releases on iTunes in FLAC format.

I read a clueless article a couple of months ago that the iPhone 7 dropped the headphone jack in order to support "hi-res" music, because a headphones jack can't handle "hi-res."

Ignoring completely that the human ear can't support hi-res, at some point this wonderful high-resolution music needs at some point to be converted to analog in order for the human ear to pick it up.  It's either going to happen at a headphone jack or a speaker wire.

I'm sure there is a future where audiophile will surgically implant multibit DACs directly into their cerebral cortex.  But we're not there yet.

Re: Apple IOS 11 to support FLAC

Reply #20
I read a clueless article a couple of months ago that the iPhone 7 dropped the headphone jack in order to support "hi-res" music, because a headphones jack can't handle "hi-res."

As if there are not already enough iDiots to defend on the wrong grounds whatever Apple may tell them (sometimes on the right grounds even, coincidence could work that way) - now you can combine that effect with audiophoolia.

Re: Apple IOS 11 to support FLAC

Reply #21
I read a clueless article a couple of months ago that the iPhone 7 dropped the headphone jack in order to support "hi-res" music, because a headphones jack can't handle "hi-res."

As if there are not already enough iDiots to defend on the wrong grounds whatever Apple may tell them (sometimes on the right grounds even, coincidence could work that way) - now you can combine that effect with audiophoolia.

Apple has plenty of reason for why they got rid of the headphone jack.  It let them have a bigger battery.  It let them add a stereo speaker, it let the phone become water resistant.

I find the presence of a headphone jack far more important than any of those things, so my 6S will probably be my last iPhone.

Kind of short sighted of Apple to not have put analog passthrough into the Lightning connector.  Forces the use of an external DAC.  The USB-C port that other phone makers chose allows analog passthrough, so no external DAC is needed.

I'm feeling Apple painted themselves into a corner here....

Re: Apple IOS 11 to support FLAC

Reply #22
Until they add FLAC support in iTunes or in iPods...  I could really care less.  Far too behind the times..
JXL

That's "couldn't care less".

Also, what's whit all the Apple hate? There's a reason we can all buy music for 99p now, and support flac is surely a good thing? I don't understand the bizarre hatred over the brand of PC/music player I buy...

Re: Apple IOS 11 to support FLAC

Reply #23
Apple has plenty of reason for why they got rid of the headphone jack.  It let them have a bigger battery.  It let them add a stereo speaker, it let the phone become water resistant.

Sure, the splash resistance is an argument ... I am not so sure about the two percent extra footprint though.
But the 'net was full of hoorays over Apple getting rid of that internal DAC. No wonder you can sell snakeoil when that is the level of knowledge.

Re: Apple IOS 11 to support FLAC

Reply #24
Apple has plenty of reason for why they got rid of the headphone jack.  It let them have a bigger battery.  It let them add a stereo speaker, it let the phone become water resistant.

Sure, the splash resistance is an argument ... I am not so sure about the two percent extra footprint though.
But the 'net was full of hoorays over Apple getting rid of that internal DAC. No wonder you can sell snakeoil when that is the level of knowledge.

The internal DAC is still there.   You need it for the speaker.  There's just no interface between the internal DAC and the Lightning port. That little Apple dongle has a DAC in it.