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[bspachman]

MC10--the one that plays (& encodes) them all?

Being a long-time staunch Macintosh user, I am extremely interested in various cross-platform issues. Ever since building a dedicated Windows box to store & playback all of my audio, I've been searching for a cross-platform lossless codec and a cross-platform lossy codec.

My lossy codec has been the old standby, MP3. I would like to move to AAC for cross-platform/portable use. However, the thrust of this thread is about lossless encoding.

Because of MJ/MC great support for it (why is that ), I've been using Monkey's Audio. However, it is only supported on Windows machines. Until today, there weren't any lossless codecs that worked well on Macintoshes (with iTunes as the player of choice).

Now Apple has released iTunes 4.5 & upgraded their iPod firmware to support something called "Apple Lossless Encoding". A long thread has already developed over at hydrogenaudio:

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?showtopic=21139

What kind of odds could I get for ALE being added to MC? Could MC hook into an installed version of QuickTime to avoid crazy license problems?

(Heck, I'd personally love a Monkey's Audio QuickTime component so I wouldn't have to convert all my files...)

Best,
Brad

[curiouslistener]

I used iTunes to rip/encode a CD in Apple's new lossless codec,
and MC10 played it just fine (though i only played it for a minute, i'd
already ripped that CD and was just testing i), unlike some others i
tried (winamp, real,helium2,musicmatch, etc). I do have itunes and the new quicktime installed so i don't know if perhaps those are used.
 The frustrating part  is that although you can look at the tag info, the "playing now" visualizers
won't show the info since they only work for "supported formats".
Perhaps thats something they could fix soon to attract customers
while they are ahead of the competition, and hopefully give us some idea if they plan to do so to avoid considering switching to the inferior in other ways iTunes.... Though also of course encoding to that format would be useful  it possible. I'd guess before that at very least allow conversion *from* that format would be useful, since it decodes it obviously it could be fed into other encoders.
   I wonder other portable players will support this codec in the future. Perhaps JRiver could  let us know what the odds are MC may add an encoder for it. Though actually iTunes uses gracenote CDDB
it gets info on classical CDs like composers so I may be stuck ripping
with iTunes anyway (actually thats my only reason to consider apple lossless rather than ape, since I can't find anywhere
a program that encodes, or tags, ape files using CDDB).

[bspachman]

I used iTunes to rip/encode a CD in Apple's new lossless codec,
and MC10 played it just fine (though i only played it for a minute, i'd
already ripped that CD and was just testing i), unlike some others i
tried (winamp, real,helium2,musicmatch, etc). I do have itunes and the new quicktime installed so i don't know if perhaps those are used.

Good to know! As soon as I get some time over the next few days, I'll have to run some tests...

The frustrating part  is that although you can look at the tag info, the "playing now" visualizers
won't show the info since they only work for "supported formats".
Perhaps thats something they could fix soon to attract customers
while they are ahead of the competition, and hopefully give us some idea if they plan to do so to avoid considering switching to the inferior in other ways iTunes....

Yes. Full tag support in MC would be required (although why Apple would develop another tagging method confounds me, perhaps it is an IDv3 tag).

Though also of course encoding to that format would be useful  it possible. I'd guess before that at very least allow conversion *from* that format would be useful, since it decodes it obviously it could be fed into other encoders.

The conversion issue is the biggest thing stoppping me from changing lossless formats. Most of the time, you have to convert to WAV, then to your new lossless format. Since WAV files don't support tagging, that mean you lose all of your carefully crafted tags...

If anyone sees a way around the tagging issue, please speak up!

I wonder other portable players will support this codec in the future. Perhaps JRiver could  let us know what the odds are MC may add an encoder for it.

Knowing how Apple usually keeps things closed, I'd say other company's support will be slim & none. However, the iPod is clearly the market leader these days, and the speculation is that ALE is based on the MPEG4 standard in some fashion, so maybe it will be come more widely supported--just like AAC has....

Best,
Brad

[curiouslistener]

The frustrating part  is that although you can look at the tag info, the "playing now" visualizers
won't show the info since they only work for "supported formats".
Perhaps thats something they could fix soon to attract customers
while they are ahead of the competition, and hopefully give us some idea if they plan to do so to avoid considering switching to the inferior in other ways iTunes....

Yes. Full tag support in MC would be required (although why Apple would develop another tagging method confounds me, perhaps it is an IDv3 tag).

MC10 *will* let you look at the tag info for the Apple Lossless files, so presumably this should be a trivial fix they could throw into one of their betas.

The problem is that despite that,  the track info visualizers won't show the track info, instead displaying "Media Center can not display visualizations for this file type. Visualizations are only available for internally supported file types. (mp4, ogg, wav, ape, etc)".