What's your favorite audio codec?

Osgorth, I believe that Rockbox supports Monkey's.

I should note that I switched back to the iPod OS for three reasons:

1. Significantly worse battery life with Rockbox
2. Significantly slower performance with Rockbox (this could have had to do with my settings though)
3. No good Ogg Vorbis players for Mac. I got Rockbox to be able to play Ogg, but iTunes really is the best media player I could find for Mac, and it doesn't support Ogg.

All in all, I'd check out Rockbox if you run a PC and don't like using only AAC or MP3, like iPods limit you.

Apple Lossless is cool because it's lossless, but it SUCKS compared with any other lossless format I know of, especially FLAC and Monkey's Audio. Both of these formats compress the file much more than Apple Lossless can. Check them out.

I have to agree with Osgorth here. I'm not sure I understand what you're saying Jc51373, and I think you may have been mislead.

ALAC is not 1:1, it is lossless compression, just like FLAC or Monkey's. (That's why it's called Apple Lossless Audio Codec, like FLAC is called Free Lossless Audio Codec). WAV and AIFF are uncompressed. However, all lossless compression is MATHEMATICALLY IDENTICAL to uncompressed audio. That means that WAV sounds EXACTLY like ALAC which sounds EXACTLY like FLAC which sounds EXACTLY like Monkey's. So the only difference between these is encoding speed (how quickly your computer can convert the file into ALAC or FLAC or whatever) and size.

This being said, why wouldn't you go for the smallest lossless compression? It's smaller, and still sounds IDENTICAL to the original WAV. ALAC already compresses, but just not as well as FLAC. Sure storage space may be cheap, but it's not free. Lossless compression will save you a lot of money and will still sound exactly like the CD.

There is absolutely no difference in how WAV sounds compared with lossless compression.

Jc51373, I am also a Mac user, so I understand why you would use ALAC. If I went lossless, I would probably go for it too because it's a bitch to deal with the other formats on OSX.

The only reason why ALAC is inferior to some other lossless codecs is that it doesn't compress as much and takes longer to encode. So yes, if you don't care about hard drive space, it doesn't matter.

As far as your 1:1 comment goes, while they are sonically identical, space-wise the ratio is more like 1:2. Lossless cuts storage in half (roughly).

I think though, that storage is a factor. For a PC you can always get more space, but what about a portable player? As far as I know, the biggest hard drive on a portable player is 80GB, not that much for some people. I'm interested to know how you get around this problem.

I like this idea a lot but it poses two problems in my mind: you need A LOT of storage on your computer (I just have a mac laptop, I'd have to buy a huge external drive) and you have to spend time putting all of your music into two formats. Do you have a way to speed this up? How do you boot two libraries with iTunes?

If I hadn't already ripped 15 GB of music into lossy, I'd take your advice Jc51373! I like your solution.