Originally Posted by
garym
Yes, Correct. One aside, you mention a "future where ALAC cannot be used". This is unlikely. Both FLAC and ALAC are codecs that will likely have encoders and decoders available for many, many years. And if they do fall out of favor, there will be plenty of time (decades) to convert them to the new flavor. And since they are LOSSLESS, the conversion to the new flavor in the future will be LOSSLESS too. For example, the first LOSSLESS, but size compressed codec I was familiar with was a SHN file. Concert tapers/traders used that for many years. You can still run across SHN files, but they are easily converted to FLAC or any other format, with available converters.
The benefit I mention of the FLAC and embedded checksum comes up in situations like this (and I know of these exact situations). Say you have a harddrive failure. And it turns out that your backups are not up to date or also have a problem, etc. So now you work hard to get all those files moved from the failing/failed harddrive (sometimes at a great $$$ expense) and now you have the files on a new drive. But when playing them, you start noticing that every so often a file is corrupt and won't play. So you'd like to know once and for all which of the files are corrupt. With WAV or ALAC or AIFF you have no way of easily doing this. But with FLAC, you point a program at the top of your music directory, selecting ALL your files in a single batch, and run a TEST. Let it run, and when done, it will tell you which files, if any, are corrupt. Most people never need this. But if needed, it becomes very important.