Bitt, no second guessing involved, good points on the impact on the disks, though the throughput would still be very low compared to typical disk performance. As for Ogg and Vorbis I always mix them up. Peter, thanks that additional comment on native FLAC v Ogg.

My goal of using FLAC was laziness, I want FLAC for the house for quality, and it made sense to keep one store of files that I can then also sync to the car. I know the quality lift would be ostensibly lost due to background noise (I have a Subaru, not a Rolls), so going to MP3 probably makes considerably more sense, and the additional process step of transcoding is not going to be too great. The MP3toFID SW may make that the obvious choice in the end.

I will give this a go and let you know whether it works over IDE - this won't be soon though!

Thanks for all the input, if anyone has additional ideas (like transcoding FLAC to MP3 on the fly - though that's probably an easy enough script), I'd be interested in hearing.

Thanks

Alan