Are you planning to replace your Music Library or Itunes Library?

i was going to to, but i have over 2500 songs and it was going to take up well over 200gb, so i didn't bother. i will when i get a new hard drive, but not for now

I would but I can't hear any difference with my shabby speakers xD

I would but to go out and buy CDs with every song I have would cost a ton of money.

I use .mp3 for most of the regular music that I listen to every day. The quality/size ration is a great mix, and many different types of players support .mp3 file extensions. One of the biggest factors in quality, is the bit rate. Most music players will show you the bit rate somewhere, and it is usually visible in the file properties. A standard .mp3 file is usually 128Kbps. I prefer encoding in 192Kbps, but if you want better quality, pick 256Kbps, or 320Kbps. I don't have much experience with the FLAC audio codec, but as I said, sticking with .mp3 files will ensure compatibility with a wider range of players.

If you are importing music and want the very best quality, pick the .wav file format. "Wave" files are the standard for uncompressed music. I do a little audio engineering for the NFL, and all the sound effects, and commercial intro/outro music is saved as .wav The downside of this file format, is that the audio is uncompressed and takes up a LOT of disk space. A normal .mp3 might take up 3MB-5MB on my computer, while the same file as .wav will usually take up around 50MB, or more.

One more thing that I would like to say, is to never try to get better quality out of an audio file. This means, don't try to make a .mp3 into a .wav file. Although the file won't be compressed, the actual content of the file will be the same as the .mp3, so you will be doing nothing but wasting space. This is the save going from say a 128Kbps .mp3 to a 256Kbps .mp3 the size of the file will increase, but the quality will stay the same, or possibly even get a little worse from re-encoding.

I don't mind using MP3 for now as I don't really have a decent enough headset to make having higher quality FLAC files worth it on the go which is when I normally listen to music anyway. I usually just stick to 192Kbps in most cases.

I do however look forward to moving away from iTunes, especially with iOS 5... I've had nothing but problems with iTunes and the only reason I use it is because I'm a fan of iOS devices.