[kornchild2002]

Originally Posted by Germansuplex

This is a deal breaker for me and the reason I went with Apple Lossless for ripping my CD's. FLAC is pretty good, but seeing as how iTunes is how I listen, transfer, organize and manage my library in general, I figured I'm killing two birds with one stone by using Apple Lossless. It's nice to be able to re-encode your music to a lossy format and have your tags filled out for you automatically in the process.

I too went with Apple lossless for my archive. It has some pretty good compression ratios (better than some levels of FLAC, WavPack, and better than WMA lossless) and iTunes has support for it. Many other applications are now starting to support the decoding (reading) of Apple lossless files such as foobar2000. You can actually convert your Apple lossless files to a different format using programs other than iTunes. dbpoweramp also support the encoding (making of, ripping) of Apple lossless files and it can also encode Apple lossless to other formats.

So Apple lossless is more open than people think. It is fast becoming a lossless standard. In fact, I would say that Apple lossless is the most supported lossless encoder given that iTunes, foobar2000, dbpoweramp, and the mass amounts of iPods out there can all do something with the format.