k00ka, you sound like an add. I do agree dbPA is the best on the market as long as you do not mind paying for ease of use.

For my 2-cents both M$ and Apple have inferior lossy formats I wouldn't trust them for anything. Go with the market leaders Flac and Ape.

Leathal, I wouldn't care so much about transcoding speed as I would about the compression rate. The Max compression takes much longer but you are saving space.

The benifit of lossless is it preserves not audible sound information. Having a lossless archive is not a bad idea. You have all the music information. Playing those files from your HD is not a bad idea either. However to play them on a mp3 player will not improve listening pleasure and waste lots of space. It is very unlikely you can tell the difference between 192 CBR mp3s and loseless. In fact it is unlikely that you can hear the dif at 160 CBR and less at VBR. Just make sure you keep your archive.

Just pulling you leg but it did read like the best kind of add a sincere one.

As for Apple and M$ lossy formats. I really need to clairfy my self. Making a sweeping statement like I made is stupid. AAC, WMA, ect are the best encoders for comercial bit rates. That is their target. AAC is know to produce artifacts in the HiFi range. Lame does not produce artifacts in the HiFi range but does produce them in the commercial range. Apple has admitted their lossy encoder produce artifacts in the HiFi range so this is fact not an opinion. The same with LAME. These judgements are come from a very serious third party audio group that even Apple respects.

I think I might be able to locate the artical about AAC if you don't believe me but it is maybe a year old so it might be hard to find.

One last thing! I didn't really explain myself.

If I remember correctly, all the commercial encoders are built on the Fraunhofer encoder. This means they are all about the same. Fraunhofer never got the psychoacustic modling right as LAME did. What I really hate about these formats are they use psychoacustic modling in a constant bit rate. They are all 'Frankenstiens'. They do what they can with psychoacustic modling then truncate what they need to make the bit rate. The VBR is a better format in my opinion because you know what the quality is while it not clear with AAC or the other comercial encoders. I understand why they did it. They pack more quality into 128 than a normal CRB. The time index is also precise. But the quality varies within a tune which drives me up a wall. I like to control the quality. I set it where I can't hear the difference and leave it at that. I think that is why so many AAC users go to lossless. That is their only clean product.