As far as digital music is concerned, you’re surely be looking for the best possible audio quality. You surely want to squeeze every ounce of performance out of your music and system. And when it comes to audio quality, you certainly have come here wanting to know the differences between the FLAC or the Free Lossless Audio Codec and the ALAC or the Apple Lossless Audio Codec.
The battle between FLAC and ALAC has been argued for years. People say that ALAC has sweeter highs and FLAC has better bottom-end authority. While the other say that FLAC sounded a bit more detailed and open but ALAC is known to have a better soundstage.
To simplify things, ALAC is an Apple-based solution to make lossless file compressed. The Apple Lossless Audio Codec or ALAC is an audio codec developed by Apple for iTunes and QuickTime playback. This was made especially for Apple iOS devices including the iPhone, iPad, iPods and the like. Its data compression method is “lossless” which means it reduces the size of audio files without losing the information.
FLAC or the Free Lossless Audio Codec was initially built as an “open” format or something that is open or doesn’t need any specified format. This free codec used to compress audio files and is developed by Xiph.org. FLAC is just similar to MP3. The only difference is that it is lossless. Its encoding or decoding methods are covered by patents making the extensible source code available under open-source. FLAC is made to be supported by most operating systems.
From an audio perspective, the analogy between ALAC and FLAC seem to have no difference when they are both recorded at the same sampling rate. This is because all FLAC and ALAC files are originally the compressed versions of “lossless”. It only means that when the original file is compressed in any format, it does not lose any of its quality. Whether you want the file to be stored or transmitted in a smaller way, it creates nothing changes when it is played in your system.
Since FLAC and ALAC are both lossless, they create no difference in sound quality. It has nothing to do with audio quality. The zeal and favor over the FLAC and ALAC battle have an audible difference.
When it comes to feature comparison, the evaluation of lossless codecs depends mainly on features over speed and compression. Though archiving is one of the main lossless codec applications, its ability to use and recover data should be of chief importance.
FLAC decoding is considered to be the fastest among lossless codecs. It serves as the most widely spread supported codec and the only one that is unencumbered by patents, non-proprietary, has an open source reference, has a well-documented format and has many other great implementations.
However, from a technical perspective, there is really nothing to choose between ALAC and FLAC codecs. Both of them achieve a very similar means at the end.