I was wondering what formats you guys are using to rip your CDs nowadays?  I have a suspicion that I'm the last person here still ripping to MP3 format for home listening.

Although hard drive capacities and software support for FLAC have long since made lossy compression unnecessary except for use in PMPs, I still make MP3 rips only.  This is due in part to inertia.  Another reason is that I don't know if my ears can discern the difference between a high-bitrate lossy copy and the original; I'm too lazy to test myself.  But even if I could tell the difference, the MP3 format is still good enough for the way I listen to music, to wit, superficially and on cheap equipment (usually laptop speakers).  I'm sad to say that my appreciation of music is facile, so the depth that may be lost in compression would be lost on me anyway.

I've made a fun sort of side-project of ripping my entire collection to FLAC but other than that the benefit lies solely within yourself.  If you don't have the setup to support hearing the difference, don't want to take the time to securely/accurately rip your cds, find yourself using mp3 more often than not (on mobile and pmps) then I see no reason to change how you rip.  There seems to be a growing trend and a bigger online preference towards flac over the last few years but since it's your collection it's entirely up to you how you want to enjoy it.  You're not ripping them for the benefit of other people, after all.

No, you're not.

I guess I could switch to a more "robust" format but it's just not important to me.

I also have a cell phone that's about eight years old that doesn't even have a camera. I'm so on the cutting edge of technology it isn't even funny

Still, my phone will die one day I'm sure... probably couldn't find a battery for something this old.

Anyway, there are times I try to act like I'm current with the latest technology but the truth is I'm far from it in most respects.

Between my Cowon players and swappable 32gb SD cards on my D2, I can carry around about 220 GB music. The majority of this is FLAC, which is what I rip all my CD's to. However, I'm starting to run out of space on one player and I'm getting to the point where I can't really cut anything, so I made a bit of a sacrifice and made some stuff mp3 instead (for some reason, PC-98 music and Gameboy music compresses horribly as FLAC). Truthfully, I can't tell a difference, but at this point, it's more a sense of knowing everything is there.

Recently, the recording quality and original recording volume has been a much larger issue for me than the lossy/lossless format. FLAC's of poorly recorded and overcompressed music are just as worthless as mp3's of the stuff.

I just got done ripping all of my VGM CDs over the last three months or so.  What format did they go in?  WAV.  Storage space is ridiculously cheap, and I would rather have everything in a simple format that can be played almost everywhere and requires no conversion.

Interesting.  I am reminded of this thread, wherein people went apeshit and jumped down Jodo Kast's throat for uploading samples in WAV format.  They seemed to take personal offense, for some reason.

I've forced some changes upon myself, in order to maximize the quality of the music I hear. I no longer listen to music in my car, due to the competition with road noise and diesel engines. This has the added benefit of increased safety. I am all too cognizant of how fragile my biological form truly is. I decided not to be too concerned with the music on my computer, either. It is strictly for storage and sampling.

My Marantz CD player is for listening. The sound quality is much improved over audio coming from my hard drive. I know this because I have tested the same headphone amp and headphones on both, and the CD player wins. There is more detail. When I don't want to use my headphones, I have no choice but to use my computer. I have no traditional loudspeakers; just a Focal PC speaker system. It sounds better than anything I've heard by Bose, Harman-Kardon, Klipsch, and the Razer Mako system. Sometimes I wonder if it's better than my headphone system. The detail is substantial for a PC speaker system.

For some instances, when I want to listen to a CD, I decompress the APE, FLAC, TTA, or TAK (damn things) files to WAV. I then burn the WAV files to disc and add it to my binder collection, which currently houses some 1500 CD-R copies. I still have some of the CD-R discs from Carl and Cloud (12 years old) and they play fine to this day. This is not always true. I've had to throw away nearly 50 discs from trades from a variety of other people, due to the fact I could not read the discs (Imation and Memorex are the most robust brands). Some people have even sent me transcodes (some of the people I trade with severely scrutinize what I send them; this is how I know). Naturally, I have had to throw away the transcode discs.

In conclusion, I have forced myself to listen to music one disc at a time, using a conventional (though premium) CD player. One problem (and advantage) of using the computer are the highly customizable playlists. There is more music in your collection than what you like and by listening to what you don't like, you'll like what you like even more.

i have never owned an mp3 player or ipoddish device. when im working at home, i always have access to my cds,, in fact i kinda use game music to pace myself as far as how much i am getting done. i cant imagine devoting time to exclusively listening to music without taking advantage of the passing time for accomplishing other tasks i want or need to do.

however my new honda pilot can read mp3s off of a cd-r/dvd-r/usb, and has a 15gb hard drive, so ill need to start filling that puppy up