[yeahdef]

Fair reasoning from the archival master standpoint. I share a lot of what I rip with other DJ friends. If I sent them a FLAC or ALAC file, they would respond "what the hell is this? how do i listen to this?". mp3 is ubiquitous and 320 kbps does the trick for me. I hope I don't feel that sting of regret you mention, but my gut feeling is that I will not. I still have the records themselves on the shelf which should last longer than the harddrives :)

[thirdsun]

I highly doubt that any of your friends use a player that can't play FLAC or ALAC - any decent player does these days.

And if you really need the occassional lossy copy it's trivial to quickly create one with XLD or similar tools.

I'm sorry if I sound more upset by this than I should be, but ripping an entire record collection is a time intensive task and you're cutting corners on an issue that doesn't save you any effort, but might actually cause more someday.

[ScottBurson]

When I ripped my LP collection I first saved each recording out as FLAC (16 bits @ 48kHz), then re-exported it as VBR MP3. Audacity (a Mac recording app) makes this easy. I keep the FLAC files on my home server for future use (or for when 1TB microSD cards become cheap :-).

[thirdsun]

While it's not cheap I recently got a 1TB external SSD ( http://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/ssd/product/po... ) in order to be able to take my whole lossless collection with me if I need to (in addition to the NAS at home). Admittedly, music doesn't need an SSD drive but I won't buy any spinning drives these days. Plus, this thing is incredibly small, robust, bus-powered and very performant. Great product.