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It's still not an Apple World, it's still an Open World ...

The following is a combination of information published by LINN and points from my own perspective.
Tomorrow afternoon I will do an on-line interview with Gilad Tiefenbrun, Managing Director, LINN Products Ltd, which will be published on this blogg. It will be interesting to hear his opinions to where this is leading, why and what it means for LINN.

Apple’s decision to finally open source its Apple Lossless (ALAC) format is welcome news. Apple lossless is basically studio sized music files (24 Bit), uncompressed, unlike the standard file MP3 found on iTunes or even CD quality which is also a compressed version of the original recording.

For one thing, people who use iTunes to store and archive their CD collection (16 Bit), and take care to change the audio quality to Apple Lossless, will be able to stream their collection to a wider range of products. For another thing it means you and I, the consumer, will have more access to higher quality music, in fact studio quality (24 Bit) rather than stockpiling MP3 low quality files that iTunes have, for many years now, endorsed.

For UK companies at the forefront of music playback in the home like LINN (HiFi), a company that has been selling 24 Bit music on-line since 2005, advocating FLAC, yet supporting an unofficial version of ALAC, it means the risk of the wrath of Apple HQ for letting people listen to their music collections through their systems is removed.

The question is why and why now? I think the answer comes from ingenious small companies like LINN utilising the opportunities the Open-Source platform have provided. By delivering first material at the highest quality then products to play at the highest quality in home, they have given the consumer the choice and what they really wanted all along. I may be wrong and it may just be Apple’s way of grasping the last opportunity to cash in on the back catalogue of music out there before the cloud based solution, such as Spotify/Youtube, completely takes over, leaving iTunes a redundant and uninteresting solution!

Whatever the motivation … I welcome it and feel a kind of satisfaction that no company, not even the mighty Apple can have it all there own way.

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