i thought i would strike up a quick format discussion here. i have 3 rios and have been using trio and jrec for as long as they have been around. again, paul, trio is awesome.

i a lot of mp3's, call it 20,000. most were ripped from my own collection (about 1500 cd's). some were ripped from the library. the rest were legally downloaded from emusic.com before i cancelled my membership to the service.

- the mp3's from emusic were primarily 128k, but in January or so they switched to vbr, which have an approximate bit rate of about 192.
- all of the mp3's i ripped were at 128k. i know.

So with hd prices way down, i am thinking about (my wife will kill me) going through the 1500 cd's again, a few each night and re-ripping.

so here's the question. what format should i use? i want high quality (i.e. close to lossless) but still want to be able to use my rios as well as my ipod and any other media devices that may come along in the near future.

appreciate the input.

If it were me, I would just use a higher bitrate MP3 with a really really good encoder.

Other formats like Ogg are great, but those formats mostly only shine at low bit rates. For example, if you compare an Ogg and an MP3 at 128k, sure the Ogg is going to sound better, but if they were both at 384k (and assuming your MP3 encoder isn't rolling off high frequencies too harshly), you're not going to hear any difference.

Also, any formats beside MP3 are going to be less compatible with other devices that may come along in the future, which is one of your criteria. If you want the most compatibility with the most devices and software, MP3 is currently still the way to go.

I just got done with a great big re-encode of my collection and I chose 256k constant bitrate MP3 via a Fraunhofer-derived encoder. I'm very happy with my choice.

One of the things that sticking with MP3 allows me to do is to apply a plethora of software tools to the collection for managing the files. There are so many MP3-specific tools for editing tags, adding/displaying lyrics, cutting and splicing, organizing, scanning, etc., that I can't imagine going to another file format even if is somehow subtly better in the audio reproduction.

thanks for the info. what program did you use to rip? also, do you have any rio performance issues with 256k? For a few weeks, i tried ripping a few discs at 95% VBR MP3, which generally resulted in files that averaged 300k or so. also, the last few albums i got from emusic were about an average of 200k VBR. both sets of files skipped a lot over the rio. i know the issue is not the network, as i am streaming replaytv all over the house with no issue. maybe the issue lies between rio/trio and the vbr format.

thanks again

I used the Rio Central, set to 256k. Its encoder is the ARM encoder which is based on Fraunhofer. Your skipping issues might possibly be related to the third-party software. I've never had any skipping issues with the Central/Receiver combination once I switched to wired 10baseT as opposed to HPNA.