Apple Lossless Encoder - Audiophile Quality?

Onhwy61 - the data is not compressed in a wireless transmission - its just data and there is not much of it at that. What makes this all work is the small size of the files and the pipe required.

Just for the record - since I didn't know I took a tour around Wikipedia. Seems that AIFF was developed by Apple in 1988 (20 years ago).It is uncompressed PCM. With the advent of Mac OS X Apple created a new AIFF format called AIFF-C/sowt which is what iTunes is now encoding in. The audio quality is said to be identical.

Now with Mac 10.4.9 (and by extension Leopard and the other kitties to come) different applications are exporting AIFF differently. Though not an issue with iTunes at present, this change presents potential compatibility issues between systems which use only AIFF, and files written in OS 10.4.9 as AIFF-C.

This is a good example of why I advocate Apple Lossless - I'd rather listen to music then worry about compatibility in the future.

Also it is unclear to me that AIFF of either flavor has room for all the metadata types we now use...

Rdc2000, when you indicate you converted your AAC files to ALAC, did you rerip your CDs? Or did you literally convert the AACs to ALAC? If you did the latter, you don't have lossless, you have blowup lossy files in a lossless format.

Hopefully, when you indicated convert you meant convert your entire library a la reripping to the lossless format.

Yes- I physically re-ripped every single cd.