[Christien]

What Ian said. I don't know the specs on apple lossless, but I suspect it isn't actually lossless. .aiff and .wav are uncompressed audio formats that have both been around for decades, so there's no real reason to reinvent the wheel, thus my suspicion. You can rip a cd to wav or aif and have exactly the same data structure that was on the cd, bit for bit.

If you're going uncompressed, there's no reason to use iTunes in the first place, unless you're syncing it with an apple device. There are better rippers and players out there, IMO.