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[krgoodwin]

Many years ago after comparing all of the digital protocols, I decided on baselining AIFF.  Seems like FLAC has become the hot protocol but I decided against it since the word compression was a feature believing there is no such thing as a free lunch. 

Storage space is not a big concern since my NAS is 12 TB.  They tell me FLAC is more compatible which is appealing but not necessarily since my wallet belongs to Bill Gates and AIFF seems to have had its start in the Apple world. 

Questions: 1.  Should I continue to digitize CDs into AIFF or switch over to FLAC?  2.  Should I convert my current digital collection over to FLAC or just keep the AIFF files? 

Related viewpoint: I've always considered CDs to be the long term easily available best digital audio source.  I just threw out all of my open reel and cassette resources having purchased a Network Player.  I have yet to become familiar with any streaming service except the free ones (SONOS and Amazon).  I wonder if my view on CDs being a long term user flexible digital audio source is no longer applicable. 

My concern is "Do I own the audio content available on such (unknown) streaming services like Spotify?"  In other words, to have the content available in my car, do I need to stream the desired content while in the car or can I put the audio content on a flash drive for the car? 

FLAC or AIFF??  It is not easy coming into the digital world - I just found a CD with the word Napster on it.

[pschelbert]

Hi

flac and AIFF are the same in audio quality. However flac is open source and the standard. AIFF is apple and not widely used.
You can convert AIFF to flac or wav (CD) with JRiver. Conversion for and back if you like. Quality is always the same.

What I use:
flac (lossless)
and
mp3 VBR 256k (lossy)

If I rip CD I use flac if the metadate is good in JRiver, dBpoweramp.
If not , itunes is a trial worse. Then rip to AIFF and afterwards convert to flac.

flac and AIFF is like zip, lossless. So is wav (CD) but wav uses more diskspace (up to double for the exactly same music and quality!)

Streaming: you do not own the music and the music may disappear as the licenses of the streamaing services are time limited (qobuz, tidal spotify all of them).

Peter

[JimH]

ALAC is Apple's lossless Codec, equivalent to FLAC.

AIFF is Apple's uncompressed format, equivalent to WAV.