What's the point of archiving to ALAC?
I did all the googling and learned pretty much all I need to know about archiving my 1000 CD collection to ALAC. And I just successfully ripped my first ever CD to ALAC.
The only question I never saw answered anywhere was whether or not there is any advantage to ALAC for archive purposes now that hard drives are so cheap.
I just bought a 2TB drive at Costco for $130.
The first CD I ripped was 693mb, per iTunes. Once I ripped it to ALAC, it was 450mb. That's a space savings of 35%.
If my average CD has 650mb of data on it ... times 1000 CDs in my collection ... that 635 gigs.
If I save 35% via ALAC, that's now 412 gigs. That (now, on a 2TB drive) is a negligible difference.
So I'm asking ... what's the point? This isn't 2004 when 200 gigs would have cost a lot of money.
I understand for playback, ALAC is cool because you've got tags and album artwork.
But for archiving a CD collection to a hard drive just for the purpose of safe storage ... is there any advantage anymore to converting the file format?
Why not just use Toast or whatever and save a bunch of disc images?