I will be shortly moving to OS X, after a history of Windows. At the moment my files are mish mash of MP3s, OGGs and AACs, but I'm in the process of standardizing them into FLAC files. My plan was to have a central archive of FLACs, and then transcoding to other lossy formats for my MacBook, iPod - etc. Is this the way to go?

If so, what formats would you recommend? As far as I can see in the Mac world, there isn't much option other than iTunes and Cog for audio playing (and for large libraries Cog looks poor due to it's dead simple management system). iTunes only supports WAV, MP3 and AAC, afaik.

Maybe AAC? I don't know though... any ideas?

Certainly you can use FLAC and transcode to AIFF for moving to other formats from there - but perhaps Apple Lossless should be considered. It is fully supported and works just as well as FLAC. Transcodes to AAC/MP3 are a breeze with iTunes.

As long as you don't have a huge WMA library you'll find OS X not too bad for most formats.
Cog supports every common format, however, it is a very basic player as you say. You might want to keep an eye on Play, by the same author as Max it should turn out to be a more advanced player.

The next OS X version (Leopard, released somewhere next spring) is said to come with native support for FLAC. If you need something right now and can't wait till next spring you might try Apple Lossless (natively supported by both iTunes and iPod) for now and losslessly transcode that into FLAC when needed in the future or when Leopard comes out.

You could also decide to build a FLAC library and just use Max to encode to MP3/AAC for portable use.

While WMA is not natively supported by OS X, WMP for Mac is available for download. Better yet Windows Media Components for QuickTime is a free download that should allow iTunes to play WMA.

That is about it, although there is also Audion, which Panic Software's people have retired and made available free, realizing they can't compete with iTunes. There's also a very early version of Songbird available.

As it happens I do just what Maurits recommends: encode to FLAC with Max and convert to MP3 for my iTunes library and portable player. In fact, I generally set Max to spit both out when I'm ripping/encoding, as it can output more than one format at a time. I'm sure ALAC and AAC would be as a good a way to go, and those two formats would perhaps be more of an obvious choice on the Mac. And if you want lossless files for listening to, not just for archival purposes, then ALAC definitely begins to look like a better choice on the Mac at present. I just prefer using FLAC and MP3 because of the wider support those formats have across different platforms, devices, players.

You can handle both Apple lossless and AAC files separately for different purposes within iTunes either by using custom playlists or by setting up two itunes libraries:

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?sto...061025105820390

I agree with the poster who suggests that it is worth having the Windows Media Components for Quicktime. But I'd say that's because they may come in useful for browsing the web. However, Microsoft retired the player for OS X itself quite some while back, and instead made the components, which they get from a 3rd-party, available free as a sop. The components don't always work with all Windows Media files, but I guess they're worth having for all that.