[blasdel]

When I was comparing them years ago I found that a lot of FLAC implementations had a lot of trouble with seeking properly, skipping to the wrong spot and then reporting a third spot as the current timecode.

Then you have the metadata problem — ALAC is in a normal mp4 container so everything's uniform and well-used, with FLAC you're stuck with the ogg container or its proprietary system. That wouldn't be so bad, except that almost nobody puts metadata in their FLAC files, instead preferring to bundle along separate text files with a description of the tracks and info about the rip. I think they do it so that the whole file's hash stays constant.

[cageface]

I haven't found that to be the case at all. All the FLAC files I've purchased have proper FLAC tags, often including cover art. I've never had problems with FLAC seeking at all.

Better still, FLAC provides excellent command-line tools for encoding, decoding and tagging so I can script batch operations easily. I'm not aware of anything similar for ALAC. Maybe with the codec in the open these tools will emerge?