Sell all your audio equipment. You have entered the hell of music reproduction. For from this point on you will be totally compressed in what you hear, and think. Better yet, give the ipod away, or sell it, to some tin eared kid. As for 'lossless codecs', while an improvement, you will quickly forget such and go with the MP3 format. Then you know you are lost.
Just got an ipod, now what?
Just received a new 120G (I think) ipod classic. I am primarily interested in putting music from my own CDs onto the ipod. I will probably also periodically buy some new tunes. I may even at some later point want to put some music off of my own LPs on the ipod. At the risk of "read the manual" advice, where do I start? What do I need to consider as far as file types? Can you or would you want to mix file types? Is there a good primer on the web someone could suggest?