I am impressed with 16-bit/44.1kHz ALAC files played through iTunes with the $10 BitPerfect app available from the Apple App Store. If you went with FLAC you would need a third-party addin to play them as iTunes does not support FLAC. ALAC obviously is a native format for Apple products. Technically they are both lossless formats and should be indistiguishable upon playback.

FLAC has always been open source, although Apple has now made the ALAC codec open source as well.

I can't think of any reason not to use ALAC with an Apple. I would use the error correction if ripping CDs with iTunes. It may take a little longer, but it will save some frustration of having to do it again for some CDs.

Couldn't find any technical reasons not to go with ALAC and it is so much easier to deal with than FLAC files.  ALAC it is.  Thank you for the confirmation. 

Hi there bierfeldt,

From a technical perspective there is really nothing to choose between FLAC and ALAC.  Both achieve a similar end by very similar means and there are absolutely no quality pros or cons that I am aware of.  IIRC ALAC has some specific features to support Airplay streaming, but as far as substantive differences go that's about it.

Apple placed ALAC in the public domain under the Apache license a couple years ago (although not before a bunch of folks had spent a lot fo time and effort reverse engineering it), so now presumably all 3rd party devices are using encoders and decoders are based on the Apple source rather than the Hammerton/Brocious code (which still had some bugs in the hi rez code paths when I tuned out a few years ago).

iTunes (vanilla) still doesn't support FLAC and I'm guessing that WMP (still) doesn't support ALAC.  Otherwise I think most all replay environments support both and so it is probably moot.  Converting between the two is also pretty straightforward so this isn't the $64k question it once was. 

Good luck!