I like to keep all my music in a lossless format, so I will never need to rip my CD collection again.
I chose Apple Lossless because it's a format that can be played directly
on my iPod, without re-encoding.
I am currently ripping CDs using iTunes on my Windows partition. Is there any Ubuntu solution?
ALAC is a proprietary codec. Ubuntu only ships free (libre) applications.
ffmpeg 
can encode and decode ALAC with the following command:
ffmpeg -i <input> -acodec alac <output>.m4a
Change input and output to you filename but you will need to rip the CD to either FLAC or WAV first (since the programs that rip CDs are probably limited to MP3, OGG, FLAC and WAV and will not natively support ALAC.
You may be interested to know that the commandline ripper abcde has support for encoding CDs to Apple Lossless Audio Codec (alac) using qaac and Wine. An option is also there for using the Open Source encoder refalac that ships with qaac. This can be seen in release versions of abcde 2.7.1 and greater.
A web page has been written that has some more details about installing qaac under Linux and also a sample conf file for abcde:
Hopefully this will be useful to you, I have just finished encoding several CDs to Apple Lossless with abcde and it is working very, very well :).
To add to this in case any one else is interested I've pulled together a script which converts a CD to FLAC and ALAC transcribing the meta data between FLAC and ALAC since they use slightly different formats. It also performs conversion from FLAC to ALAC as part of this process and could be easily modified to go the other way. It takes the whole process from rip to FLAC/ALAC rip with 2 clicks and in under 15 minutes, it can also be used to batch CD rips.
See here
