Lossless for regular CDs?

Most will do it just so that, in the future, you have all your basis' covered for conversion.

ie, if you convert to a low bitrate MP3, b/c you just listen to the tunes on a portable player, and don't notice any different on tiny ear buds, that's fine. Later though, you decide to play tunes on a speaker set and you start notice large differences.  With only that low bitrate mp3, there is no way you can improve the quality of the music and your only option is to re-rip the music again, in a better format. 

 

If your content with the quality of the music, by all means go ahead and do it. There is no sense in keeping lossless tracks if you are sure you will never need to access them.

 

If I could listen only to FLAC files I would, but my cell phone doesn't support its playback and my MP3 library is much larger.  Luckily, to my ears a well-encoded MP3 is almost indistinguishable from its FLAC counterpart.  I do however like having as many songs as possible in both FLAC and MP3 formats.  It's important to me that I'm able to re-encode later on, perhaps using different encoding options or a different encoder altogether.

 

Right now I use LAME with variable-bitrate encoding, in joint-stereo with the best available algorithm (-V 0 -q 0 -m j).  If you do decide to use a lossy format I recommend taking some time to read up on different encoders and their various options that can effect sound quality.

 

Bass is often the giveaway in the MP3's I listen to.  At times it's too tinny (Dollar and a Dream III, J. Cole) or too soft (Ni**as in Paris, Jay-Z and Kanye West).

There is definitely a noticeable difference that becomes more apparent the higher end your setup becomes. Buy an external HDD or another internal. If you ever do upgrade to high end headphones you will wish you never got rid of your flac files because you will be reripping them.

I personally don't really bother with lossless ripping unless the recording and mastering of the album was real good.  Otherwise there's not much need to.

Show me a person who claims they can hear the difference between ALAC/FLAC in a blind test and I'll show A. a person who doesn't know what a blind test is B. a liar C. a musician or audio engineer who's been doing their line of work for 20 years+

 

That was exaggerate but it's just to make a point. Not a giant difference. Certainly nothing to be fussing over.

 

That said, YES, once you downconvert to even 320, digits are permanently lost and can never be retrieved. It's difficult to tell between 320 and lossless and maybe even impossible in serious listening sessions but it's important to have a master copy of the song and since Harddrives are cheap now and don't take up as much space as CDs and don't degrade in condition (not as fast as CDs anyways), there is no reason to not have a master copy of all your CDs on your computer.

 

lol hard drives aren't cheap atm but I sure wish they were because I need to pick up another 2TB as I'm running out of storage space

 

Unless budget is an issue, I'd rip all my CDs to lossless to preserve the original quality of the recording. I would assume that all lossless formats would sound the same if outputted correctly by the software.

Biggest difference that happens acoustically is when your processor/decompressor handles the files, it used to be more obvious due to difference in algorithms and how they handled decompression of the lossless ALACs or FLAC. While I do not hear the difference between lossless files, I prefere to store everything in the PCM, and AIFF is my choice on my as it handles tags well. 

I bought 3 2 TB drives last year, luckily just before the flood that raised prices of hard drives. They were $99 each. I did this because I rip all my music to FLAC whenever I buy a new CD, and then back it up to external drives so I don't have to do it again. Hard drives are still cheap enough, what is your time worth?

 

I listen to FLAC on my computer setups and Stereo and Home Theater setups. I use LAME encoded MP3s (Extreme Mode) on my portables. I would be unhappy if I just ripped everything to MP3.

+1 for lossless. Who cares what format you use on your portable media player, but I do lossless on my Galaxy S variant with Voodoo sound anyways.
A good home system will easily reveal 320 vs lossless.
I am lazy so I rip to WAV. My crappy iPod gets the Apple Lossless version of my WAVs since Apple crap doesn't read FLAC.
Buy a drive, lol. Then you will have enough space to store an mp3 version as well for a media player...


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This.

 

Unlike compressed video, which can be distinguished much more easily (and without hurting your wallet very much at all), compressed vs uncompressed audio really requires an expensive ($2500+) setup to discern differences in. Either that or a sound engineer who's used to listening for things almost all others don't take note of, which someone else already mentioned.

For  almost everyone it would be very hard to hear a difference between 320 vs lossless. I think more than 95% wouldn't hear a difference between 192 vs lossless.

Whenever I want to fill up my portable, my music library software converts to mp3 (or whatever I want) on the fly, so I don't keep mp3 copies around to take up space.

If most of your listening is casual or iPhone, maybe you could just rip to mp3 only and listen to the cd when you're serious listening. This would save space.

It's obvious you can tell the difference or you wouldn't have bought 24/96?, so:

1) get the hard drive.
2) don't keep dupes

P.S. how much music do you have if you're filling up terabytes? I think I have a decent collection and it's less than 200 gigs. =^]

Buy a new drive and keep your music lossless.