Okay, I felt compelled to come in here and say this:
Flac Vs Alac, you won't hear a difference, period.
HOWEVER............ ripping original or even copies of original cd's thru itunes to
get ALAC files is a horrible, horrible decision. The software is terrible at it, period.
Scratch here and there and it craps on everything. Even on a perfectly good
CD, the rips just aren't accurate... they don't sound like the CD would.
I was highly dissapointed when I would put ALAC files on my 5th gen Ipod.
Just.. no magic there.
That was until I decided to run EAC in high priority compressed into FLAC files.
Whereas Itunes would dedicate 1 minute to ripping an entire CD, EAC would
spend up to 20-30 minutes carefully reading bit by bit and re-checking everything after.
When the files were finished, I use dbpoweramp to transcode them to ALAC for my
iPod. I also use dbpoweramp's re-check mode to verify all is ok. The result is amazingly
accurate, lossless quality tracks. So good, in fact, that i immediately erased my 100+ cd
collection off my hard drive ripped from itunes and began slowly ripping with EAC.
It's been extremely rewarding. The detail extracted by EAC has brough new life to all of my cd's. I've caught myself riveted listening to cd's I've always thought sounded "awful"
as new layers come up.
Long story short: if you need ALAC, rip thru EAC and transcode to ALAC; you'l be more than pleased you did. Itunes rip = terrible. EAC rip into Alac = Bliss.