i ripped the paragrasph below from the spotify forum, is this any good to you, does it answer your question?
We get files in lossless formats (flac, wma lossless, wav, apple lossless) from the labels.
The big labels (Universal, EMI, Sony, Warner) have their own tech departments. They encode to the standard "cd quality" directly from the master recordings, which are usually in even higher quality. No cds involved.
what exactly is spotify? have you actually received audio files in all those different formats listed ?
I'm not a big fan of apple products, so I don't use itunes, but I'm pretty sure that the only format of audio files that itunes uses from that list is the apple lossless format (obviously.) all the other formats will have to be converted to a format the itunes does support, such as mp3.
all you need is the basic free version. be sure to download and install the various codec plugins you will need (ogg, flac, wma lossless, and apple lossless) from the codec page of the website
