If
I had the hard drive space, I would rip my collection (over 2000 cds) to Monkey's (APE). If you are going to be playing back on a fairly good system, you might consider adding more hard drive space, since it's not that expensive these days. Since APE uses lossless compression, the sound quality will be equal to that of the original. Remember, though, that an APE compressed file will only be about 50-75% smaller than the original WAV. Also, having your music in APE format makes it easy if you need/want to convert to other formats (for portability or sharing).
APE should be more like 250 to 300 MB per audio CD. Compression is around 50%.
I use the
High setting and rarely get 50% compression. Most of my files probably average in the low 60s to low 70s It seems to have a lot to do with the type and loudness of the music.
In my mind, the only reason to use MP3 is if you want to be able to use the files on a portable player or if you want to share them and don't want to deal with converting from APE. The biggest drawback of MP3 for me is that it has problems with truly gapless playback (for dj mixes and live albums).
Ogg Vorbis at higher bitrates (-q 6 and up) is pretty much equal to MP3 at similar bitrates, and doesn't have the gapless problem. However, most of the sound quality tuning has been concentrated on the lower bitrates (below 128, -q 4 and under) in anticipation of upcoming support by some portable players.
MPC is generally considered to be have the best sound quality at higher bitrates (160 and above), but is less well known than the other formats. It is probably not a good choice if you want portability and sharing, but is great for sound quality without going crazy on the bitrate.
Before you start ripping, you might consider choosing a few tracks of varying types of music and encoding in the different formats and see what sounds good to you on your system.
Rob