Thanks for the tips. I think I fall right below crazy to crazy. Okay, so I found the recent posts showing how to use an external encoder (qaac) to transcode to ALAC. I took the Ipod into my car to try on my new Alpine head unit and voila...much better sound than the VBR-Extreme setting that I was using before. I know this is a frequent conversation (quality vs compression). But to me, in a car surrounded by 4 speakers, its a very noticeable difference.
Now I am trying:
--tvbr 123 -s %IN -o %OUT
To see how that compares.
I have 160gb Ipod on the way to replace my 4gb Nano. With that amount of space, I may do some math and see how much I can fit at ALAC settings. Or the slightly less crazy...