Overwhelmed by all the file formats out there (and not a very techno-savvy guy). If this is not the right place for me, please send me elsewhere (digitalmusicfor idiots.com ?).

If I want to transfer music from CD's into a portable player (Rio Karma or iRiver IHP120 for example) and get the best sound quality possible, it seems I should rip into FLAC or WAV. If I do this, roughly how much music will I be able to store on a 20GB player?

With FLAC you would be able to store about 50 albums... pure WAV would be about 30...

(only estimates... real numbers depend on FLAC bitrate and length of each album)

If you used 128kbps compressed audio (like MP3), you would reach about 350 albums.

20 GB make about 2000 Minutes of uncompressed PCM in 44100/16 ... assuming you have an average compression ratio of 40-45% ... well, you could store some 2800-3000 minutes of flac'ed music ...

Using wav, you can put around 38 hours of music in it.

With flac, the exact amount depends on the kind of music that you listen to. Classical music can be compressed by as much as 4 times, so you'd get ~150 hours. Modern records can be shrunk to ~60-70% of their original size, making it a total of ~55-60 hours.

However, if you're not planning to e.g. connect your portable to an external receiver, or use it to transfer music from one PC to another, I suggest that you stick with ogg vorbis. For a portable, using a lossless format is usually an overkill.

A lossless format will also use battery power quicker than lossy as it will need to read from the hard disc more, this could be important with a portable.

There may be some, but I do not know of any portables that support lossless, other than possibly raw wav. With a lossy at 128 the iPod supposedly has enough memory to store 3 typicals songs in memory (just what I have heard - I do not own one) which as the above poster stated, greatly reduces hard disk I/O and thus saves your battery quite a bit (and possibly the life of the unit).

I have 10 newly-ripped albums encoded in flac using --best and they total 3.3 gb, or about 330 mb per album. If that's a fair average, then on a 20gb disk you should be able to hold 60 albums with a couple hundred megabytes to spare. Lossless on a portable is probably overkill, but if that's how your music is stored on your PC, it might not be worth the trouble to do all the transcoding to a different format.

The Rio Karma (http://www.digitalnetworksna.com/shop/_templates/item_main_Rio.asp?model=220&cat=35) is a 20gb devices with micro-hard drive with native Vorbis and FLAC processing. $349 retail, Saw at bestbuy for $299.

Not an advertisement by any means, but it would be nice to have it all.

Cal.