This is more a general reply rather than specifically to Schofiel.

I've actually found the converse side of the 'ripping fidelity' debate to be interesting.

For instance - I recently compiled two CD-A's of my eighties songs to play on a trip (I don't have an empeg - my brother bought my queue number the bastard). I did this by choosing the MP3's that I had ripped, copying them onto ZIP, taking them to my brothers' place (he has the CD writer) and converting them to WAV with Winamp. The audio purists out there have already gone a ghastly shade of white at the mere thought of having all those possible errors around when I had the originals. They will go into a collective apoplexy when I reveal that some songs have small errors - blips, glitches, slight fuzzinesses where the read process didn't quite work. All these got put onto the CD-As.

I couldn't live with the tracks if they were from a low-bitrate MP3 and sounded like a computer reconstruction. But the little glitches remind me that I'm listening to a copy, and that I have the originals safe at home. They also remind me that these were taken from a very selection of eighties stuff and that there's a whole lot of other ways to compile it into CD-sized chunks. My current car stereo system isn't wonderful, so the actual reproduction probably masks any minor errors the MP3->WAV conversion process has introduced.

On a side note, I'd heard that people who complained of faulty CDs where the original CD they purchased had the error-rate copy-protection scheme (i.e. their CD player didn't like it) were given an exchange CD which had no copy protection. I.e. if you had problems copying it you could simply go back, claim you had a priceless hi-fidelity hand-crafted CD player that was more dear than your own mother to you and was far superior to everything else and it was clearly this disc that was faulty, not your system - and they would just give you a CD that was copiable.

Dunno for sure about that last bit, though.

Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.