I'm kind of picky about my mp3s, I usually rip them at 320 kbps off cds, and when I download I try to get as good as possible. Anyways, I was fiddling around iTunes and remembered that you can rip your cds in a variety of formats and bitrates with that program, so I was wondering what anyone else thought was the best format. I've had a good deal of experience with wma and mp3, and I recently ripped a few songs to aac for comparison. My conclusion is that there doesn't seem to be much difference between the different formats. A certain bitrate will get about the same quality in the different formats, or at least that's what my ears are telling me. Anyone else know any more about this?

I used to be really paranoid about quality loss and all that, and ripped everything at gazillio/kbps. Or maybe not. But anyway, even recording at 128kbps, there is no real noticeable loss in audio quality. If your still a bit paranoid, ripping at 160kbps is pretty much the best bang for your buck.

Also, as I've mentioned in other threads, be careful which encoder you use, as some produce lots of crappy artefacts. I've found the encoder in musicmatch jukebox to be the best I've found so far, as I dont get any issues with artefacts/quality loss, but hey, everyone has their own fave.

As to the supposed war between formats, .aac is a viable alternative for mac users (I hear the compression is pretty much the same), .wma is just microsofts attempt to break into digital music world, and should be treated as such. MP3pro is actually turning a few heads, giving exactly the same audio qual at twice the compression. Not quite sure how it works, but shit, it'd doublehard drive space in half, if I could be f#ked converting 20GB of music... Ogg Vorbit is a good codec, but really, why use it when it offers no real advantage over MP3? Same goes for any other obscure formate you usually only read about.

My fav has been and will be for a long time, Musicmatch Jukebox. :| Untill someone shows me a better one anyways.