Van T Tran
yes, what Doof said. Ape has saved many of us from the constant re-ripping that is inherent with mp3. You see, with mp3 (or wma, or any other lossy [read lousy] format), your hearing will soon adapt and you will begin to notice what is absent from the music that you love, so you will then re-rip your CDs at a higher bitrate, and then repeat the process another half dozen times, before switching to ape anyway. Save yourself the time and effort, and do it right the first time. Unless you have 75,000 or so songs--if that's the case, I'd consider just sticking with mp3s. Yes, you will need more hard drive space with ape than the others. No, ape isn't good for streaming or for portable players. I rip to ape, then convert a copy to mp3 in another directory for that purpose. That's where your cdr v. vbr question fits in, and opinions vary (vbr is probably the best). The benefit with ape is that you will really have CD quality sound and if you want to burn music CDs, you don't have to dig the original CDs out. After I rip a CD, the CD doesn't come back off the shelf--the original is my "archived" copy, if that makes any sense at all.