On Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 9:42 AM, Brion Vibber <brion@pobox.com> wrote:
On Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 2:33 AM, Magnus Manske <magnusmanske@googlemail.com> wrote:
The Apple Lossless Audio Codec has been released under Apache license 2.0:
http://alac.macosforge.org/trac/wiki

Something to add to the Commons file format portfolio? Do we support
FLAC already?

I think that puts FLAC and Apple Lossless in pretty much the same boat: we probably ought to allow upload in those formats as nice lossless source material, but it'd be nice if we can consistently automatically transcode them to something that plays consistently in browsers at suitable live-download bitrates. (Ogg Vorbis and, in a world with slightly less patent madness, MP3.)

I went ahead and tossed in Bugzilla entries for these:

FLAC: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=32103
Apple Lossless: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=32104

That TimedMediaHandler extension needs to get finished up and deployed or we're going to miss all this format fun. :)

There's also an older bug entry requesting support for WAV and AIFF uploads with automatic transcoding *to* FLAC (as an archival format, I think): https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20252

Certainly accepting .wav input would be handy at times; .wav transcode *output* may also be useful for short audio clips on mobile (MP3 is also very widely supported, but patents blah bla).

-- brion