AAC, AIFF, Lossless, MP3

Jeffreybowman2k, I am not the expert but I dont think there is a 320VBR. If you are using the newest version of LAME 3.97, then the highest VBR setting you can use is -V 0 which will give you an average bitrate of around 256. What quality switch are you using?

true enough you cant specify the bitrate in vbr (because, by definition, it is variable) bit if you set itunes at vbr highest quality you can approach 320 avg bit rate. i actually prefer using EAC with LAME or WAVPAC to get best results.

Portugal11: Just a little OT, but you don't have to have the Nike sneakers to use the Nike shoe chip. Just buy a shoe pocket or ShoeWallet that velcros to your sneakers, and it'll work just as well.

Yes - you definitely always want to have "error correction" checked!! This is critical especially when you are doing lossless for archival and hifidelity use.

While the EAC fans will argue that they still get a better rip, in my experience "error correction" gets you 98%+ of the way.

BTW do some searching here in the PC Audio Forum and in Audio Asylums PC Forum - you will find that a lot of people are maintaining dual file formats - not the easiest thing in the world but hardly impossible.

http://forum.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/fr.pl?icomp&1146119362&read&3&4&

I found myself in similar situation. 800 + cd's ripped to apple loseless on my mac and a handfull of ipods, nano, mini, shuffle, video, etc. for different family members. I found an apple script that takes selected apple loseless tracks, rips them to AAC transfers the AAC to your Ipod, then deletes the AAC from your itunes library. Now there isn't a mixup of which files to toss and trouble keeping track of multiple trascks ripped to different compression ratios. here is the link.

http://www.dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/scripts07.php

pete