Wow this is really fascinating. I’ve seen a lot of support for FLAC but I’ve never been able to get an iPhone or iPod to read them. I wonder why flac and other high end lossless file formats are not supported.
They never supported Ogg Vorbis, and they don't support it's successor Opus now (except in Safari where is required as part of the WebRTC spec.)
Fortunately, being lossless it's safe and easy to convert between FLAC and ALAC (or vice versa). FFmpeg can do it, and also supports Apples "CAF" (Core Audio Format) as an intermediate format if required (e.g piping between different encoders) - that's handy for keeping metadata intact between formats.
Apple generally has a very strong case of NIH.
MP3, FLAC (and I assume AAC) requires floating point math to decode.
https://xiph.org/flac/changelog.html
Come to think of it, that still might have been one of the historic reasons for ALAC's creation. Its development started before.
For listening purposes lossy codecs are all capable of being perceptually lossless for trained or untrained listeners, including MP3. MP3 gets a bad rap because low bitrate mp3 does sound awful. 320kbps or higher is sufficient for 99% of listeners, including audiophiles. Most listeners can't pass a double blind study in pristine conditions, let alone average ones.
It's a lot like 192kHz 32 bit recordings. 96kHz audio bandwidth and almost 200dB of SNR has a purpose, but that purpose is not for day to day listening. Your ears, brain, speakers and amplifiers cannot reproduce or perceive the extra information.
It's also the case that MP3 encoders got better over time, and if you're considering the sound of a 128kbps (or 96kbps) MP3 encoded by the Fraunhofer encoder you got from IRC in the late 90s; it's just not going to be good.
Back before mp3s became ubiquitous, you could rip a CD to .wav files and it would basically sound identical to what was on the CD. But then you’d also be using some 600MB versus the same CD sounding not quite as good but only using like 40MB and at that time that was a lot of disk space to use.
Also, if you want music that was recorded in 5.1 surround sound, sometimes the surround version is only available from lossless sources, while lossy sources sell only the stereo downmix.
> sometimes the lossy versions of downloads have "loudness wars" compressed dynamics
The loudness war has been over for years, and it was precisely due to lossless CD audio that it existed in the first place.
Have you seen the size of disks and network bandwidth recently? There is absolutely no reason to bother with lossy audio compression.