I regret the decision to compress. I started "way back" in 2000 building my music library when compression made sense and disk space was still pricey. Now, I would not hesitate to use lossless though the constraining factor would seem to be lack of sufficient iPod capacity and performance. Various rooms at our home enjoy local control (via used laptops equipped with sound cards attached to audio systems) from a central server containing .mp3 clips at about 5:1 compression. I decided early on to standardize on one jukebox player (MC), one type of file structure, one distribution network. iPods can be sync'd either from the server or client. Anyway, I'm off the topic. I think my question has been well addressed and I appreciate everyone's time in responding. The original source material used to create my compressed music library largely scattered to the wind, not to mention the considerable time spent cleaning the file names for consistency and syntax. Now, if someone could figure a way to "rebuild" compressed .mp3's back to their original WAV state, the world would be a beautiful place!