> What's the point if you have to convert to mp3 before
> playback on the rio receiver?

Archives, or playback on non-Rio hardware. If I'm going to go through the trouble to re-rip my entire collection (and now that I have an 18-CD SCSI jukebox, I'm looking at doing that), I want to only do it once. If I can possibly find a good lossless format, then it makes sense to rip it to that format and use that as the basis for later, downgraded, files.

If you can automatically transcode, even better -- then WinAmp could play (maybe), ogg transcodings of flac files (unless you could get a flac plugin), while the Rio gets 256k MP3s. And when you hook up your walkman, it gets 96-128k (depending on whether you're planning to be jogging or fishing ). All from one "flawless" source.

Maybe.

Can flac be put into the Rio? Not into the native client (there are no hooks for expanding that), but the alternative clients that are popping up might be made to support it. However, the same problems that came with Ogg come with FLAC or anything else -- the Rio only does integer math. So you need a good, fast, integer-only decoder.