itunes advice

[Snowreap]

there's nothing inherently wrong with WMA, but it's not the best choice for every situation. I use WMA Lossless for the "master" copy of all my music. I turned off the "copy-protect my music" option, of course, since the whole point of the master copy is to make further copies. if you've ripped a lot of music to WMA format and you didn't turn that option off, then you will probably want to rip all your music again.

whether you rip to WMA again (properly this time) or some other format depends on your situation. for example, you might not have enough disk space to keep a lossless copy on-hand (I currently have 275 albums ripped, using 70GB of disk space). I have lots of disk space (3.4TB free on a 4.5TB volume), and prefer the flexibility of being able to convert to any format at any time without worrying about distortion from lossy compression or needing to re-rip from CD again.

from my WMA-Lossless master copy, I downconvert selected albums to WMA 128Kbps for my car, but could also just as easily convert to some other format (like MP3 or OGG), depending on what the target device supports (my car does support WMA so I just use that). I use MediaMonkey to do conversions, because it has good batch support, including renaming/moving files (which is important for me, since the best layout of files and directories for my car is very different from the layout I want on my server).

if you don't have a lot of disk space, you are probably better off ripping directly to your final desired format (e.g. 64Kbps MP3, or whatever). but if you want to use a different format later, you will probably have to rip everything again because converting from one lossy format to another can often introduce distortion.

-ken