Yeah, I've started buying digital a bit more. I use Digital-Tunes.net ..really nice electronic music site. They offer WAV/FLAC/MP3, and you get all 3 formats with every purchase, and the ability to download your purchase as many times as you care to. High quality front-cover album art is usually included. Very nice prices, too.
Yep, FLAC is the absolute best but it takes up a ton of space so I don't have that many albums ripped in that format. Usually just 320kbps or 192kbps for long albums for me.ex-mortis
It doesn't take *that* much space. Relative to MP3 tracks, sure..but not relative to today's massive HDD capacities. For PMPs (flash-based especially), yeah, FLAC tracks are going to be a bit much. Utilizing lossless formats probably reduces battery life anyway (more storage activity due to the larger filesize, intenser decoding process as well.)
But it's perfectly fine for a home machine. I'm averaging something like ~40GB per 1,000 songs (I only use FLAC Level 5. Multi-track+cue.) Really not a lot with 3TB of storage..and you can get 1TB+ HDDs for well under $100 these days.
Also, audio quality isn't really the reason to use FLAC (properly-encoded lossy will sound the same on all but the most high-end hardware), I use it simply because it makes transcoding for my various media devices less problematic. Lossy->lossy is a no-no. For my PMP, I roll with Vorbis.
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