Two years ago [musicstorage4, musicstorage6, musicstorage1, musicstorage2, musicstorage-solved3, musicstorage3, musicstorage-solved1, musicstorage8, musicstorage-solved2, musicstorage5, musicstorage7], I set out to use a single Lossless Audio Compression format for all of my music. It turned out that there was no single format that was compatible with all of my playback devices.
Incredibly, this is still true today. Yes, there has been a lot of progress, and although there are many lossless formats available, three leading formats have emerged:
As you might expect, Apple iPods only play the ALAC format. Some, but not all, Microsoft "Plays for Sure" devices only play WMA Lossless. Many other hardware makers are now supporting FLAC, presumably because the format is an open, free standard, but FLAC files themselves are not fully supported by Apple's iTunes or Microsoft's Windows Media Player 11. Sure, you can add FLAC support and parts of ALAC support to WMP11, but not all features are supported, such as metadata.
For the 70-80 million ![[WikiPedia]](http://www.mikeyp.com/css/external.gif)
of use who use iPods with Windows computers and want to listen to true lossless CD quality music, this format nonsense is a complete pain.
This week, Steve Jobs wrote an essay about Digital Rights Management , and claimed that "all iPods play music that is free of any DRM and encoded in 'open' licensable formats such as MP3 and AAC." Yet he neglected to mention that the Apple Lossless format is propietary, and that the iPod doesn't support any other lossless format.
Jobs said that if the record industry stopped requiring DRM, and instead allowed online music sellers to provide music in open and non-restricted formats, "Apple will embrace this wholeheartedly". Well, Steve, why not prove your willingness to use "DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats" by supporting a non-proprientary lossless codec on the iPod and in iTunes?
Like, FLAC, for instance?
After reading many sites about all this you hit it right on, trying to not buy every song on a CD and being able to deliver it to any device, iTV, PC, iPod, other MP3 player in lossless format does not seem to interest anyone, at least only one :
I mean these http://www.musicgiants.com/ guys seem to be the only ones doing it legally and ironicaly I just went to there site and it is down for 2 hours - they have no competition and act like it.
Everyone is repeating this over and over again that they would buy Apple Lossless via iTunes if they would just sell it !!!
Right now I think using MusicGiants, hoping they have all the music you want, using Illustrate's dbPoweramp to convert seems to be the only choice, other than buying an entire CD, looks like yourmusic.com would save you some money there.
Anyway, thanks for saying it clearly MikeyP
Fred
Sorry about double post there, I'm and idiot…
Forgot one other thing while looking at this I came across the comment about CD's themselves are not the best format? Super Audio CD (SACD) and DVD-Audio are best ? Well at least it looks like they are priced higher and possibly do not have many recorded that way so I can't feel cheated there. Like I do when I buy a CD and hate every song but one 
Thanks for letting me post out, Fred
Thanks for the comments Fred, glad to see someone else who understands the issues.
I just bought some DRM-free music from Linn and a couple of other sites, so I'll post my experiences soon.
As for SACD, I want to like that format, but so many SACD disks have been "over-remastered", like adding multi-channel mixes to the original stereo recording. I'd rather have the best representation of the orignal recording. But check out http://store.acousticsounds.com/ for some of the best recordings anywhere.
