Way more than ALAC. Music in FLAC is provided by many music services and digital stores. Music in ALAC? I never saw it being sold anywhere.
> because there's almost never a reason to care about having a lossless audio codec.
That's utter nonsense. Any time you want to reencode your music, you care about the lossless codec for the source, otherwise you'll degrade your quality. For example if tomorrow some state of the art lossy codec comes out which reduces size / computational complexity of decoding (such as Opus for instance), you can reencode your audio library in it for usage in mobile devices and so on. But without lossless sources that won't be an option. Lossless codecs are functionally equivalent to audio CDs. Lossy ones are not.
Because almost nobody has any reason to want lossless music. Anyone buying music in FLAC is deluding themselves if they think they can hear a difference between that and a properly encoded lossy codec like MP3 or AAC.
> Any time you want to reencode your music, you care about the lossless codec for the source, otherwise you'll degrade your quality.
True. But this is an issue for so few people as to be effectively zero. Extremely few people actually do this sort of thing, and I would wager that most of them aren't Apple customers to begin with.
If Apple had infinite engineering resources, then yes, it would be nice to solve every single problem for every person, everywhere. But Apple's engineering resources are not infinite, and it would be a flagrant waste of those resources to spend them on issues like this that impact effectively zero Apple users.
Because of inadequacies of the MP3 encoding format, no bitrate of MP3, even the max, can encode all possible things that the human ear can distinguish. There is one song I know of with a particular synthesized effect in the upper treble that is very profoundly different from the lossless original even in a VBR0 or 320kbit MP3.
Additionally, I've read that MP3 (I don't know about AAC) doesn't preserve enough phase information for effective use with matrix-encoded (e.g. Dolby Pro Logic) surround sound audio.
But Apple's engineering resources are not infinite, and it would be a flagrant waste of those resources to spend them on issues like this that impact effectively zero Apple users.
What was wasteful was inventing ALAC instead of using FLAC.
Why not? Keeping a master copy can be an issue for any user who cares about quality. You can see it as keeping a master tape, so any subsequent copy (=lossy encoding) won't degrade the quality too far.
> and I would wager that most of them aren't Apple customers to begin with.
Why so? Is it some kind of stereotype that Apple customers don't care about quality of music or can't be audiophiles?
> If Apple had infinite engineering resources, then yes, it would be nice to solve every single problem for every person, everywhere.
Adding FLAC support in their QuickTime framework is trivial. Excusing the lack of support for it by lack of engineering resources in Apple should be just embarrassing for them, not even to mention that it simply would be a lie.
