Apple Lossless vs iTunes Plus

Blindjim - I got this Lacie drive for $99 when they had a special. The regular price is $119 but this vendor and almost all the other sites are constantly offering daily or weekly specials.

The sites I've found best to deal with are:
http://newegg.com
http://www.buy.com/
but you should also check out
http://frys.com/
http://www.tigerdirect.com/

A good way to find deals is to check these sites when you're in the market for something:
http://www.techbargains.com/
http://dealmac.com/
http://dealnews.com/
Techbargains has pretty good search functionality. Many sites like newegg and buy.com have newsletters that list whatever they're selling cheaply

I wasn't aware of any reliability issues with 1 terabyte drives but either smaller capacity drives or a RAID array are certainly great solutions, as Jax2 recommends.

Apple Lossless vs iTunes Plus
Any audible difference between the two? I only buy/import from CD's in Apple Lossless but I would like to stop buying CD's.
Sakahara

Sakahara, It is very easy to use your CDs to test the iTunes Plus 256 kbps AAC encoding. Just change the Import Setting preference when ripping your CD and when importing choose "Don't Replace"

Whether there is an audible difference will depend on *your* music playback system, and *your* hearing ability. Do try a test with a few different songs. I found with certain songs it is very difficult to tell. Some listeners systems have such high fidelity and acute hearing that they are able to tell the difference like it was comparing wine to water.

cheers, ed

I didn't know what iTunes + was at first (thought it was another garbage compression codec like MP3, only slightly better), and once I found out I realized I could import my CD's with AAC to compare. I was curious to hear others opinions though.

My system is very resolving, hearing too, so I will probably notice a difference.

Regarding storage of iTunes Library on external drive; I thought of this too. Wouldn't there be access issues, even with FW800, compared with the system drive? Maybe use NAS instead? It is more sensible though, especially since mine is larger then my system capacity - 140 GB and counting.

I wonder if these iTunes + lossy files are made from originals? I can only hope.

Is there an obvious audible difference between Apple Lossless, WAV and AIFF? I haven't compared. From what I read Apple Lossless seemed good enough.

sakahara, a great number of users have music stored on external drives. some have over 2000 CDs in ALC or WAV no way to fit that on a system drive in a notebook (yet). Transfer speed of USB 2 is adequate for music files. I use a FW 400 750MB drive with 600+ CDs and have another duplicate drive with backups. BTW my files are AIFF/WAV (no compression) No problem here. My system is linked below.

On the sound difference - since you are looking for opinions. Yes I can hear the difference in different formats. No I cannot hear the difference in formats. It is song dependent for me. Simpler music it is more apparent. complicated electronic music it is less apparent.

cheers, ed