Flac vs Apple Lossless

Playing music on a computer

For Mac OS and Windows, I recommend Songbird. On Linux, I love Amarok.

I like to play music from my computer

It’s more convenient to play music from the computer than inserting the CD in my hi-fi;
It offers enhanced features, such as displaying the lyrics, artist bio, etc.;
The software can build smart playlists from what has been played before;
Don’t worry, my iMac is very silent, and my hifi is plugged with an optical link.

What format to use?

But there are many ways to store Music on the computer:

Wav, Aiff, etc. are just wasting to much space, and do not handle tags (artist, album, track name, etc.)
MP3 is ubiquitous but severly impacts sound quality. However, I have bought several sounds on Amazon MP3 store, and I must keep this format.
Ogg is similar to MP3, it has a better compression but is less supported (shame on you, iTunes). I have downloaded sounds on Jamendo in this format.
Now, when storage is cheap, the best choice to rip CDs is to use a lossless encoding ; I know flac and Apple Lossless.

Flac

Flac is the format I have used to rip my CDs in the past couple of years.

It is open-source,
it is well supported: Extremely well supported on Linux, well supported on Windows, little support on Mac OS (but not in Apple iTunes)¹
it supports tags;
it has very fast encoding;
if offers very fast decoding²;
from my experience, it is slightly (5%-10%) more compressed than Apple Lossless

Apple Lossless (Alac)

iTunes can rip CDs into « Apple Lossless ».

the format is proprietary;
Poor software support. Only works in iTunes;
Poor hardware support, only Apple devices can play it.
it supports tags.

For mobile play

For mobile play, it is not necessary to have genuine sound quality, because small hear plugs can give a good sound anyway. Plus, memory space is rare precious.

That’s why, I re-encode my songs in Ogg Vorbis, at 96 kbds VBR.