FLAC - Free Lossless Audio Codec http://flac.sourceforge.net/ FLAC is a lossless codec developed by Josh Coalson. It's part of the Xiph multimedia portfolio, along with Ogg, Vorbis, Speex and Theora. FLAC PROS * Open source * Very fast decoding * Fast encoding * Hardware support (Karma, Phatbox, etc...

Apple won't budge for at least 12 months on this, if ever.
Discussion over!
Now, everybody say it together..... FLAC

A vote for native FLAC support. A few notes on my choice (and against ALAC): 1. it's free (I would guess that Apple Lossless would cost something [read:significant] to license) 2. it's open source (widely supported - more so than Apple Lossless) 3. it's attainable/usable right NOW, not in 6 or 12 or...