Lossless coding is the latest extension of the MPEG-4 audio
standard. The MPEG audio subgroup has recently finalized the
standardization of lossless coding techniques for high-definition
audio signals. As an extension to MPEG-4 audio, the 'MPEG-4 Audio
Lossless Coding (ALS)' standard defines methods for lossless
coding.

MPEG-4 ALS defines efficient and fast lossless audio compression
techniques for both professional and consumer applications. It
offers many features not included in other lossless compression
schemes.

* General support for virtually any uncompressed digital audio
format (including wav, aiff, au, bwf, raw).
* Support for PCM resolutions of up to 32-bit at arbitrary sampling
rate (including 16/44.1, 16/48, 24/48, 24/96, 24/192).
* Multi-channel / multi-track support for up to 65536 channels
(including 5.1 surround).
* Support for 32-bit IEEE floating point audio data.
* Fast random access to any part of the encoded data.
* Optional storage in MP4 file format (allows multiplex with video).
* High flexibility of codec parameters for various applications.