I haven't found that to be the case at all. All the FLAC files I've purchased have proper FLAC tags, often including cover art. I've never had problems with FLA

I haven't found that to be the case at all. All the FLAC files I've purchased have proper FLAC tags, often including cover art. I've never had problems with FLAC seeking at all. Better still, FLAC provides excellent command-line tools for encoding, decoding and tagging so I can script batch operations easily. I'm not aware of anything similar for ALAC. Maybe with the codec in the open these tools will emerge?