They should be, now that the mighty Apple has entered the giving-away-software-for-free war! I can see it now:
FLAC team: "Here take our software, it's free"
Apple: "No, take our software, it's free"
FLAC team: "Not only is our software free, you don't have to pay for it"
Apple: "You don't have to pay for ours, either"
FLAC team: "But ours was free first"
Apple: "But ours comes higher up an alphabetised list"
Rest of the world: "But does it come in a variety of colours?"
Yep, I guess they want to appeal to the audiophiles in some way, not that there's any reasonable difference between ALAC and FLAC since they manage the same levels of compression (about 50%) and will obviously sound the same, being lossless an' all.
Whereas I guess people could argue between lossy codecs (MP3, AAC, OGG) because there is actually a difference.
Not necessarily. I wouldn't call myself an audiophile, but even I can tell the difference between a 256kbps and lossless file. It depends on the music, of course, and probably even if the lossy track was encoded with VBR (or some other tedious techy thing), but some 256 rips sound 'crushed' in places.
So I tend to rip from CD to computer with ALAC (because it's a Mac) and then use the 128 transcoding doobry when synching to iPod. Real audiophiles would probably baulk at that, but frankly if you're listening through earbuds on the train, anything else is just pointless.
I suppose to an extent it does depend on your audio equipment. What do you usually listen to music through?
I can tell the difference between lower bitrate MP3s and V0 but not sure I'd be able to tell the difference between V0 and FLAC.
Video on the other hand I'm more picky. I hate poor quality video, or more so, video that should be better but isn't. I don't mind a mobile phone video being low quality, since that's the format/style.
I think my biggest gripe is with ITV Player online. Their catchup service is a shocking quality whereas I think the quality on BBC iPlayer is really quite good, and they even offer HD streams in places.