You are right duke, and I have briefly tried several decoders/converters, namely: Exact Audio Copy, DBPoweramp, Foobar2000, and Songbird
For me, to build an archive of lossless music format in the Windows environment, I found WAV or FLAC format to be most practical.
1. WAV can easily be drag/drop into Itunes. Itunes can play WAV directly if PC will be the source. Itunes can also convert WAV into ALAC (Apple Lossless) if the Ipod will be utilized as the digital transport. The premise of all of this is to play hi resolution music files (so MP3, AAC and likes is not being considered on my part). WAV is 2x the size of FLAC and will occupy more disk space.
2. FLAC will have the same digital information as WAV and is half the file size. FLAC cannot be played directly into Itunes. FLAC will require another player (software) to make PC as a source transport. FLAC needs to be converted into ALAC in order to be played into Itunes and likewise have your Ipod as the source transport.
So, in order to allow the PC and Ipod as digital transport,
WAV = Simple, 1 ripper/converter, Itunes as player is enough, but, 2x the file size of FLAC
FLAC = Needs 2 Players (Itunes and FLAC player), 1 ripper/converter, needs to convert FLAC to WAV for Itunes, 1/2 the size of WAV
As for the CD ripper/Converter, I prefer DBpoweramp and second Exact Audio Copy (EAC) for the Windows environment:
1. DBpoweramp is most convenient. Can rip CD to desired format (WAV, FLAC, ALAC). Can convert to and from into the desired format. Can do batch conversion at one go. Not free.
2. EAC is also convenient. But cannot rip or convert files into ALAC. Limited to WAV and FLAC for lossless files. No batch processing. It's free.
Looks like I will go with WAV files that I will archive and convert from and to other formats. Anyway cost per gigabyte of storage now is becoming affordable. In order to avaoid duplicate copies of different formats, I will just maintain the WAV files delete the other formats which are not being used. Coverting from WAV to other formats can easily be done by softwares such as DBPoweramp.
Thank you to all who can contributed to the thead. Please keep on posting as the development of digital music is on its way to being equal to analog in terms of resolution. There is still a lot to learn and a lot to share in our community.