I have, wow, EXACTLY 300 GB (reported by Windows), of FLAC music. It really is preferable. I always envisioned something like this...where your desktop (with tons of storage space) stores all your music at perfect quality and then the quality is reduced on-the-fly for less storage-capable devices or for streaming over the internet or whatever.
I have my UPnP server setup to re-encode to extreme MP3 because I mainly use MP101 music players and even on a B network, they stream fine. And that's basically the best quality I'm able to get since they don't support FLAC.
FLAC is my personal choice because it just seems to be the most popular and common lossless format. It's the first lossless format I heard about.
With that 300 GB, I have 11,807 FLAC songs (all directly from CDs) which averages to 25.4 MB per song. I have some very long pieces mixed in there, but just a few. That's a reasonable estimate.
The way I look at it, I always have those few songs that I absolutely love. Back when I have iTunes, I would pull out the CDs from time to time just to listen to the best copy...there was some difference, I could tell, and there's some difference in what you can't hear--but your mind notices. Why can't I devote twice the space to my music? Suppose I used a very high quality MP3 bit rate, I may get 12.5 MB per song...that's a very high bitrate...probably 320. But anyway, twice to get exactly the original?
GO FLAC AND SIT BACK