iPOD or not?

[vrykyl]

yup - agree with Lee - creative ftw
the ipod is a fashion accessory, not a serious mp3 player imo (hides in bunker) ... all my friends that have had them (accept a few mac fanatics) have now moved on to better things

[autopilot]

Why not just encode at a higher bit rate mp3, sure itll use more space, but you have 60GB

The trouble, for me anyway, is that i already have a large OGG collection due to the need for gapless playback for about 1/4 of my music. Transcoding between lossy formats can give a serious hit on quality.

That said, these days with plenty of HDD space i rip CD's to FLAC, which can be transcoded to any format with the same quality as if i ripped from the CD everytime. Lossless is the way forward, at least for archiving your CD's.

[TooNice]

That's what I've been doing for quite some time (one of the reason I need heaps of HD space)
I started with Monkey Audio (better compression, although there are better now), but I've moved onto FLAC because it is easier to decode. Not a big deal on the PC, but it means that it is more likely to be supported by non-Apple (ALAC) players.

Still, LAME @ APS/APE is really not bad at all. I've passed the Foobar ABX test between LAME @ API and FLAC.. But I have more trouble between a good MP3 encode and a good Ogg encode.