The sound quality of Apple Lossless and FLAC will be the same, so the choice depends a lot on which "ecosystem" is more important for your purposes. If you are heavily invested in SBs, then FLAC is the way to go because Squeezeboxes play FLAC natively. If support for Apple products is important to you (AirPlay, iPods, etc) then you're better off with Apple Lossless. Personally, my library is mostly FLAC, but I keep a parallel lossy copy in MP3 format for use on iPod, laptop, and other mobile devices because on those I can easily live with the lower fidelity of MP3.
If you have several SBs and your comment on iTunes is that it is "bearable", then my reaction is why bother with Apple Lossless at all? There are ripping and management tools that support FLAC that you are likely to find much better than "bearable" (eg, dBpoweramp, Winamp, foobar2000, Media Monkey, and many others). So why go with Apple Lossless. If your server is capable, there is nothing wrong with transcoding to Apple Lossless and sending to multiple players. But if the server doesn't have enough processing power then you can run into problems with dropouts as the server cannot transcode fast enough to send a steady stream. As for what SBs play natively, this chart from the wiki has a good listing: http://wiki.slimdevices.com/index.php/Hardware_comparison It may not answer all your questions, but it's a good start. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ aubuti's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2074 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=94619 _______________________________________________ ripping mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/ripping
