AAC, AIFF, Lossless, MP3

I agree with Tvad that, if you are taking the sound from the earphone out of the ipod, you likely won't hear much of a difference b/w lossless and a 320VBR. On the other hand, if you take the sound from the line out (which makes a HUGE difference) and if you have high quality cables, headphone amp, and earphones, you will definately hear the difference and you will want less compression than any MP3 codec will provide -- i find that anything other than lossless is a disappointment. One thing I do to preserve space is to selectively synch the music on my computer so that not everything goes to the ipod all the time (e.g., some of those 80s hairbands are in low enough rotation at this point that i don't feel i am losing anything by keeping them off the ipod).

there are a few lossless codecs that are actually slightly more compressed than Apple - such as FLAC -- that i believe ipod will suport. the space savings won't be major, but may give you a few more discs on 8GB of memory.

if you haven't checked it out yet, i suggest you visit www.head-fi.org. you will find out all you ever wanted to know and more about the world of portable music.

portugal11, i actually use the Sonos wireless music system. It has a digital out that I then send into my Cary 306.

For encoding, I use EAC using LAME encoder. I never tested other formats like AAC, OGG, etc.

Portugasl - just so you are clear, there is no iPod output that goes to a DAC. Both the headphone and the line out (USB/dock) provide an analog signal. As far as quality goes, my experience is like Jeffreybowmans - up the quality of the righ and you will hear it. I also agree with him that using the sync feature is the way to manage the content.

Let me leave you with another thought. Like a lot of people you are backing into hard drive based digital. My prediction is that this will replace your transport in the next 24 months. From that perspective spending your time ripping to anything less then lossless means that you will be going back to rerip your CD collection again - soon. Look at the big picture and manage what you carry around as opposed to limiting how you will manage your music in the future.

Ckorody,

What I was thinking about doing was keeping everything I already have in Lossless for home playback. And, making copies of the Lossless files in MP3 format for the Nano. It's kind of cumbersome to have two different copies of the same song for an entire collection but that's the only option I see available.

For those of you using MP3 in iTunes, how are you configuring it? I have checked 256, VBR on, what about the other settings? Do I leave those on auto? Also, I didn't use error correction, should I have?

Thanks again!

Portugal11: What you are proposing is very cumbersome, but certainly possible. You will want to make sure that you have configured itunes to selectively synch to your ipod. the best way is probably to specify that itunes only synch "checked" files. Then you could make sure that only the MP3 files have been checked in your music library.

As for the import settings. i highly recommend 320VBR with Highest as the setting for quality. You find these in the Preferences tab. The other settings for importing can be left "auto" (which i believe is the default).

All of this advice is premised on the thought that you will be using the line out with upgraded earphones and an external amplifier. If, on the other hand, you are simply using the stock earbuds that come with the ipod run from the earphone output the, IMHO, it doesn't much matter what settings you use b/c it will all sound like crap anyways. Again, that's just my opinion.