Lossless conversion format help

Daedalus_audio - Apple lossless is indeed lossless. You can convert a WAV file to Apple lossless and then back to WAV and the original and converted WAV files are bit for bit identical. You can rip a file to Apple lossless and convert it to WAV and it is bit for bit identical to a WAV file ripped directly to WAV. Are you sure you have checked the box to do error correction when ripping with iTunes? If you are hearing major differences between Apple lossless and WAV then it is probably a playback issue or some other software issue, not a issue of Apple lossless being "lossy". There are lots of very detailed discussions on this topic and some people think there are subtle differences between various formats. There may be some minor errors is some of the software, but the actual data bits are the same. Since Apple does not provide details on its file format, it is very hard to analyze the various meta data in the file.

Mmike84 - I would suggest you look at dbPoweramp. It has a batch converter and I believe it can convert AIFF (or FLAC) to WMA, although I have not tried it. Note that WAV and FLAC files do not have embedded tags.

Lou - My point is that I think the Apple lossless files are a correct lossless representation of the original CD. Any differences you hear between ALAC and WAV is probably due to the software involved (iTunes, QuickTime, etc.) and not to the music bits in the ALAC file. The ALAC files that I have converted to WAV are identical to WAV files ripped by EAC - once you take account of the drive offset differences that you can get between EAC and iTunes. I would suggest taking one of your Apple lossless files and converting it to WAV and comparing that WAV to a file ripped directly to WAV. My guess is that the WAV files will be bit for bit identical and that they will sound the same. If you compare 2 identical WAV files and hear a difference, then that is an entirely different problem. Give it a try. You can use iTunes to convert ALAC to WAV. EAC has a option to compare WAV files and it will take into account the drive offset differences you may get using different rippers.

I moved from iTunes to J River to get away from the possible issues with iTunes/Quicktime and to get flexibility to use higher resolution files, to use ASIO and because I could customize the interface more to my liking. But I converted my ALAC files to FLAC rather than re-ripping the files. My tests in converting ALAC to WAV made me believe that I did not need to re-rip. The dbPoweramp batch converted is a great tool for doing mass conversions. It is fast and uses mutiple processors if you have them.