There seems to be very little movement on new audio encodings on OS X. As another example, there are no SHN or FLAC players on the Mac that I can find. These are two lossless formats that are common in the audio recording area. There are programs for converting to and from them, but not for playing.

The cynical side of me wonders if Apple is being slow to integrate other codecs in order to strengthen the relative position of AAC.

As you say, there's no way of encoding ogg files with iTunes, but it will play them... http://www.illadvised.com/~jordy/

I'm actually working on a QT component to play FLAC along with another programmer. The two of us have been in touch with the programmer of the OggVorbis QT component and will likely include FLAC as another CODEC within that component.

Also, iTunes hasn't opened up its API for registering alternative codecs for ripping audio. This is unfortunate, but we hope a future version of iTunes will make this possible.

Follow the progress of the FLAC component on my blog at: http://radio.weblogs.com/0134505/categories/CoreAudio/

There hasn't been an update recently, but it's coming. Patience, please.

I hacked up a script for my own use in encoding audiobooks to Ogg Vorbis. In case it's of use to anybody else:

  http://e-scribe.com/software/bookvorbis/

There was a recent flurry of activity at qtcomponents that resulted in a new OSX compile that has much better performance. see this thread: http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?thr...726&forum_id=135636

Some more news:

  http://e-scribe.com/news/252

I'm closing this topic due to a rash of QuickTopic spam (though the admins do seem to be cleaning it up speedily). Feel free to contact me via email.