I've recently been playing with various audio codecs. I have used MP3 for a long time, but I thought I'd try some others, especially as some are a lot more "free-software-like" and a lot more efficient.

I've decided to use FLAC for ripping CDs. The lossless nature of it is very good and the size of 20-30MB per track doesn't really matter with today's large HDD sizes. My "MP3" player also plays FLAC files although they are a bit too big for the player's flash memory.

I've been converting a load of the ripped FLAC files into Xiph's Vorbis format, and it is so much better than MP3. MP3 is adequate at 128kbps, but Vorbis is pretty much spot on. Vorbis was even quite usable down at 64kbps.

Anyone here got any particular preferences?