Well it's <i>lossless</i>, so you can transcode it without worry. I'm not sure if you can encode it without Quicktime, but decoder support is widely implemented.<p>Apple originally developed ALAC for their AirTunes WiFi remote-speaker system. It supports low-latency streaming, and seeking works a lot better than with FLAC in every player I've used. FLAC's pointlessly-special container format suffers from the same screwy metadata problems as the other ogg formats: Apple wanted it in a standard mov/mp4 container.