Quote Originally Posted by gortnipper View Post
I prefer FLAC for a several reasons: 1) high sound quality; 2) it is non-proprietary; 3) it stores metadata that you cant get with WAV; 4) you can store it at Level 5 on a backup (if you do that) and then use a tool to convert to uncompressed for use on your music server, with no sonic degradation (remember, the degradation observed in FLAC "compression" comes at run-time, not encoding time).
I don't mind Apple proprietariness. Ever since I left the PC / Windows world my computer life is much better off.

Supposedly AIFF is the Mac equivalent of WAV files. Can metadata be stored in AIFF? If not, it's not a big issue for me.

I'm using John Kenny's Cuinas DAC. It can do some pretty sweet things with the right files.