Description

Apple Lossless (also known as Apple Lossless Encoder, ALE, or Apple Lossless Audio Codec, ALAC) is an audio codec developed by Apple Inc. for lossless data compression of digital music. It is the audio equivalent of the Lossless JPEG image format. Audio data is compressed without any loss in quality, allowing digital audio to be stored and transmitted at a higher quality than lossy compression formats, such as MP3. Apple Lossless supports up to 8 channels of audio at 16, 20, 24 and 32 bit depth with sampling rates between 8kHz and 384kHz. Apple Lossless is designed to store digital audio files with no audible loss of quality from the original source. It does this by compressing the audio data, which reduces the size of the file without losing any of the actual audio information. Apple Lossless uses linear predictors and fast Fourier transforms to compress audio data, as these techniques can reduce the size of the audio data without compromising the sound quality. Apple Lossless files are typically stored with an .m4a extension, although they can also be found with the .caf extension.

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