Higher Quality iTunes Coming?

AppleInsider is reporting that an updated release of iTunes Producer includes the ability for record labels to encode music in Apple Lossless Codec (ALC), which may indicate that Apple is preparing iTunes for distribution of music in ALC.

There has been other evidence of these developments, with one MacRumors source claiming that Apple is indeed planning to add higher quality songs to iTunes in the near future including the possibility of ALC's use. However, since similar previous claims were discovered to be unfounded, the claim was considered at best uncertain until AppleInsider corroborated the story.