Well, hang on. If you're interested in quality and space isn't an issue AND every device you want to play the music on supports it, I say go ahead and leave your rips in WAV format. That's totally uncompressed, raw audio data. It's pretty expensive in terms of disc space, but you're not making any compromises on sound quality.
FLAC is supposed to be lossless, but it doesn't play on a very wide range of devices. If you're ever interested in sharing your collection with anyone, they'll have to have an iPod too.
A good high-quality mp3 (say, over 196kps) is plenty good enough for all but the most golden-eared audiophile. Oggs can do better with similar compression, and support is pretty decent (all desktop players, many portable devices). The other plus about ogg is that it's an open source codec, which I support. Mp3 is actually proprietary.
|