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Just a clarification: ALAC does support HiRes audio, the 16/44.1 - 48 limitation is due to the iPod hardware/firmware (for which I did separate conversions). ALAC is in some ways just a different wrapper than FLAC around the lossless data, usually conversion is only limited by drive speed (read & re-write the files) rather than AAC or MP3 which actually require CPU-intensive transcoding.
One reason I was so excited: I have quite a few HD Tracks etc. albums in better quality that play back fine on my Mac and it would nice to enjoy their potential in portable use (as you wrote) I could probably reverse those few to FLAC format separately, but all my CD rips are in ALAC too and that'd be a LOT...
As far as AAC goes, yeah it's MP3-like, don't really use it or care, just mentioned it as a (currently) unsupported format.
Hopefully, given the price tag, iRiver will put some real effort behind this product and I'll be keeping an eye on it with my cc handy