Of course, if the files are significantly larger than what I have now, I might have to wait until I can upgrade my drives again...

Flac files tend to come out about 1,000 kbits/s, or about five times the size of good quality MP3s. Anyone with two 80G drives in their empeg would need to wait for 400G notebook drives to come out, which on past form is at least a couple of years.

In case Roger doesn't mention it, a good way to use flac files is to rip everything to flac, keep it somewhere, and have a small script that runs through all the flacs encoding them to MP3, or whatever the lossy format du jour is. That way, if a new lossy format -- Vorbis, say, or AAC -- comes along, it only takes a small script tweak and a few CPU-weeks to redo everything in that format, and not all that tiresome CD-shuffling.

Peter