My view: the MP3 format was a good temporary solution to a lack of cheap storage, but its days are numbered and you should definitely rip everything to FLAC:
1) Hard disks and flash memory continue to rapidly drop in price. Already the average music fan could store their entire collection in FLAC on a hard drive costing around $300. Three years from now that will be $150 and you'll have your whole 1000 CD collection in FLAC on your $300 ipod. 2) MP3 has some minor shortcomings -- hard to play it gapless, no widely accepted replaygain standard, differing quality of decoders, etc. 3) When it does finally die, MP3 isn't that great a source for transcoding. If you have FLAC files, when and if something better comes along transcoding will be easy and perfect. When you transcode your MP3 you'll likely get something that either takes much more storage than the source MP3 and sounds no better, or takes the same amount of storage and sounds worse. Bottom line: it's affordable to use FLAC now, so you may as well do it right once, know you're getting the best quality, and save yourself the future hassles. Lanier -- lanierb ------------------------------------------------------------------------ lanierb's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=5566 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=30263 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
