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The Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC, / ə ˈ l æ k /), also known as Apple Lossless, or Apple Lossless Encoder (ALE), is an audio coding format, and its reference audio codec implementation, developed by Apple Inc. for lossless data compression of digital music.
The 'Music' category is merely a guideline on commercialized uses of a particular format, not a technical assessment of its capabilities. For example, MP3 and AAC dominate the personal audio market in terms of market share, though many other formats are comparably well suited to fill this role from a purely technical standpoint.
Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) is an audio coding standard for lossy digital audio compression.It was designed to be the successor of the MP3 format and generally achieves higher sound quality than MP3 at the same bit rate.
HE-AAC is also used by AOL Radio and Pandora Radio clients to deliver high-fidelity music at low bitrates. iTunes 9.2 and iOS 4 include full decoding of HE-AAC v2 parametric stereo streams. iTunes 9 thru 9.1, iPhone OS 3.1 and Fall 2009 iPods have support for HE-AAC playback for version 1 with no parametric stereo.
An audio coding format [1] (or sometimes audio compression format) is a content representation format for storage or transmission of digital audio (such as in digital television, digital radio and in audio and video files). Examples of audio coding formats include MP3, AAC, Vorbis, FLAC, and Opus.
Following the introduction of the iTunes Store, individual songs were all sold for the same price, though Apple introduced multiple prices in 2007. Music in the store is in the Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) format, which is the MPEG-4-specified successor to MP3. Originally, songs were only available with DRM and were encoded at 128 kbit/s.
AAC performs better than MP3 in listening tests all the way up to 192kbit/s. (Listening tests I've seen which say otherwise have compared LAME MP3 to iTunes AAC neglect to mention the fact that LAME is the best MP3 encoder out there and iTunes is *not* the best AAC encoder out there.
Apple and Microsoft support the ISO/IEC-defined formats AAC and the older MP3. Mozilla and Opera support the free and open, royalty-free Vorbis format in Ogg and WebM containers, and criticize the patent-encumbered nature of MP3 and AAC, which are guaranteed to be “non-free”. Google has so far provided support for all common formats.