[daeken]

The real benefit to lossless encodings is that you don't experience a second generation of loss when you want to transcode. Going from, say, MP3 to AAC is pointless and causes considerably more loss than FLAC to AAC. But for most people, an MP3 or DRM-free AAC file is Good Enough (TM).

[pearle]

Exactly -- for me it's all about transcoding and not locking myself into a lossy format. This is why I rip all of my CDs to flac and not AAC/MP3.