tournedos: That'll
be culturally difficult and there's not much pressure - everybody else
is expected to "embrace" Apple by its customers, while Apple itself can
do this as difficult as possible without getting much flak (pardon the
pun).
I agree. Well put.
tournedos: I haven't looked much into this, but I believe one issue is
that tagging is still a bit volatile in FLAC specs, especially for
binary data like embedded cover art.
I don't seem to have any problems in that regard.
tournedos: The music industry will of course be highly suspicious about anything open & free.
This I disagree with to some extend. Many musicians offer flac as their only lossless format, and there are (small) music labels that focus on high definition (24bit, 96/192khz) audio and use flac as the format for delivering that.
Plus, all of my collegues either use straight bwf files (wav), aif, or we use flac - at least for storage. I don't know anyone using wma lossless or alac for storage, and I do know a few. Hell, even my main portable recorder does flac (as well as bwf/wav, mp3, and mp2).
Hehe, even Metallica offers flac downloads.