That's what I do. The point of lossless is to have a stable archive that can be converted into the convenient format and bitrate of the day. It's great that Apple is finally open-sourcing their codec but it would have been far better if they'd just thrown their weight behind FLAC in the first place and avoided this completely gratuitous and consumer-unfriendly fragmentation.
> would have been far better if they'd just thrown their weight behind FLAC
That would definitely be better, but the fact is that they can't (reasonably) re-write all of the previous iDevice firmwares to support FLAC, so open sourcing ALAC benefits all of the users with those devices. If open source codecs is the route Apple is going down, then perhaps they will ad support for FLAC to new versions of iOS, but for everyone not using those versions, this would still help. Throwing weight behind FLAC is good, just throwing weight behind FLAC is slightly less good. All that said, using lossless codecs on an iPod, like you said, is a bit overkill.
What I think would really be nice is if Apple would open source the music database on the iPod -- not being able to load an iPod from Linux/not iTunes (easily) is much more of an issue for me than support for a lossless codec.
What I meant was that it would have been much better if they'd originally thrown their weight behind FLAC instead of developing ALAC in the first place. We're stuck with it now. I think it's very unlikely they'll ever add support for FLAC in iTunes or iOS now.
