When you view the Properties on a FLAC file, it shows the checksum... Does NOT do the same thing for ALAC...
bummer. probably displays the checksum for FLAC, because FLAC stores the checksum in the header as a metadata tag (which is why it's so quick to generate an FFP file, it's just reading the FFP that is already calculated and stored in the metadata, rather than calculating the checksum again). I guess ALAC doesn't store the checksum in the header? (I've never used ALAC, so I don't really know).
anyway, not sure if the st5 of the decoded WAV file will help, if foobar doesn't give you the checksum of the ALAC, then you have nothing to compare it to.
like I said, I've never used ALAC. I'm curious now, can you send me one of the ALAC files?
also, just generally speaking, foobar is a great program, and even if we can't figure out a way to verify that the files was losslessly decoded, I think it's safe to "trust" foobar. for example, if you try to convert between lossy formats (mp3 to ogg, for example), it'll give you a warning and tell you why a lossy to lossy transcode is bad. based on this experience, I would expect foobar to give you some error or warning if it
wasn't a lossless conversion from ALAC to WAV. The folks behind foobar definitely know what they're doing, and since ALAC went open source a few years ago, it's very easy to have ALAC implemented correctly. So you really should not have any issues.