Now imagine storing it in FLAC and playing them everywhere, without having to transcode at all.

That's someone else's windmill to tilt, sorry.

Oh, if you're using homebrew and you want ffmpeg to support ALAC, you can do that. brew edit ffmpeg; add `depends_on "fdk-aac"` and `--enable-libfdk-aac`, `--enable-nonfree` to the relevant sections, remove the bottle section; then, brew reinstall ffmpeg. There's probably a better way to do this that doesn't trigger a merge conflict each time they update the bottle hashes (resolved easily with brew edit ffmpeg, repeat above), but I'm lazy and ffmpeg doesn't update frequently. I have no idea if ffmpeg can maintain ID3 tags from FLAC->ALAC or not, but if you have need of this knowledge someday, say hi to that future for me!

(And if compilation fails with a specific weird error about corefoundation corevideo coreaudio etc, uninstall and reinstall your macOS command line tools, because they're broken; `sudo rm -rf /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools ; xcode-select --install` will do that.)

> There's probably a better way to do this that doesn't trigger a merge conflict

Well if you want to try Nix, https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/9dba669e8a53f00114b53d... right out of the box :D

Though I had read about it already, your comment is the first time I’ve seen a compelling real-word reason for me to install Nix.

That’s what I get for not saying “in Homebrew”!

I mean it was perfectly clear in context. That's why I wrote the "Well..." dependent clause; I know I'm providing the better way for homebrew.

oops "not providing the better way for homebrew." (edit window.)

I wonder why you wouldn't just use ALAC full time? As mentioned in my other comment any decent piece of software or hardware supports ALAC these days.

Sure, if you don't have any use for iTunes or iOS FLAC is the obvious choice, but if you do use iTunes there's really no need to keep two formats around. Just use ALAC.