Why on earth can't we get APPLE LOSSLESS as a pluggin. Then I never have to keep going thru this BS with iTUNES. Please, I need a good reason why there is no ALAC support/ pluggin for J RIVERS!!!
Plug-ins are just that - externally written code that 'plugs-in' to the program. The reason why there is no ALAC plug-in for MC is because there isn't any interest by anybody to write/debug/maintain one. You can always use an external encoder like iTunesEncode.
Sorry if this sounds ugly, but YOU chose to use an iPod, YOU have some need/desire to use Apple lossless, APPLE chose to make their format and player fairly closed and proprietary, and now here you are DEMANDING that SOMEBODY ELSE fix all of your problems.
You have two choices if you really want help with this.
1) Learn how to code and write the plug-in yourself. Good luck getting the info from apple though, the only external from iTunes converter that I am aware of is iTunesEncode and it calls the iTunes API (that means that while it is 'external', it still uses iTunes to do the encoding).
2) Post a polite explanation of what is/isn't working and ask for help.
Here is a suggestion: search this board for 'iTunesEncode'. Follow the instructions that you find. If it doesn't work, start another post explaining in detail what you have done and what is happening. I am guessing that you will have issues due to the .m4a extension. You might also do a search on .m4a to see if there are any know workarounds to get these files on to the iPod as audio files.