Why have they dropped ALAC support from WP7.5 to WP8?

[remotelocal]

This is an odd one. I have my whole library in Apple Lossless, which is a byproduct of long term itunes use. Switched to Windows Phone 7 because i love the OS, and seemed like a happy mix with a mac running my music at home. Zune of course didn't support ALAC despite the codec going open source last year (i can see why they wouldn't have bothered updating zune at that point), but now i've had a couple of days with an Ativ S (waiting for my 8X though!) i'm dismayed to discover that it can no longer play .m4a ALAC files.

what gives? why degrade the experience? should i expect the 7.8 update to WP7 devices to also kill ALAC support? As it stands, this is a big feature of WP for me. And the change for WP8 seems ridiculous!?!

Anyone else got any idea if/when codec support might 'improve' back to where it was previously?

 

[blehblehbleh]

Are you talking about on the phone itself? Because as far as I know all windows phones never supported ALAC. It supports an .m4a container but not the codec.

 

[SnailUK]

I never got lossless mp4 working on wp7. Zune just reencoded them to mp3s.
Sent from my RM-821_eu_euro1_342 using Board Express

 

[remotelocal]

okay, thanks for that. From what i remember last year, i was complaining that zune didn't support m4a when the phone did, so i was running itunes on my work pc to access all my alac music. zune would only see the mp3 stuff obviously. but i think my confusion must come from the windows phone connector software, because i see all my library on my mac at home and add anything and it works. is it encoding on the fly for me? if so, cool i guess. it's never been a slow process so i didn't imagine it was doing anything more than copying files. that said, ALAC is open source as of late last year, so no reason to lock it out. make it easy for a mac user to drop everything apple? that seems like an easy win...

 

[remotelocal]

Okay, i'm not going crazy, this has actually happened. Check out this release info for version 1.1 of windows phone connector for WP7: Windows Phone 7 Connector 1.1 released | Windows Phone Central

They added support for syncing Apple Lossless Files from Mac to Windows Phone 7. And now the WP8 music app can't play back ALAC files. Why? Makes no sense really. And it's definitely a case of the WP8 software not being able to play back, not the syncing.

 

[blehblehbleh]

Oh wow, I never knew that. Makes me rethink about using the connector so I can load my collection onto my phone instead of these mp3 files. Other than that I have no idea. Possibly development rush. Hit MS up, it's all you can do at the moment sadly.

 

[remotelocal]

Okay, a little bit of clarity here! Poorly documented, but i'm running a WP8 HTC 8x and my itunes library is on a mac mini. the windows phone app copies music from the library onto my phone, and transcodes on the fly. It doesn't give you any options on format/bitrate, or info for that matter, but it works! So my ALAC library can stay as it is, and i can still just chuck music on my WP8. huzzah!

If you drag and drop ALAC via the file system (on win8 for example) then the phone won't play the files as they are.

 

[shamrock soft]

Now you can play ALAC audio file using Windows Phone Flac Player from Shamrock Soft

 

[Ionut Antiu]

You can listen to your M4A (ALAC) or FLAC files on Windows Phone 7 or 8 using Style Jukebox Cloud Player. Just remember, you must first install it on your computer to upload the files.