Hi, I'm really confused and would very much appreciate if anyone could help me out here. I just bought an iPod to replace my Rio Karma that crashed for the second time in 3 months and is now beyond warranty. It sounds like the AAC standard for encoding isn't widely regarded as offering the best sound quality. It sounds like consensus is that MP3 is a better choice for a compressed format. This also has the advantage of being transportable to many other types of players in case I replace th iPod with something non-Apple in the future. I have to re-rip my CDs because there were ripped into OGG format, which doesn't work on iPod. I've read these forums extensively and have learned that LAME MP3 is what most folks use, and that 192K is probably a good "high quality" choice while still producing reasonably small files. It sounds, however, like there are many other types, compiles, versions, settings, and options that need to be considered when encoding an MP3 file, and this is where I totally get lost. I don't know what to do with all this code, the DLL files, the executable files, and so on. This is where things to beyond my level of expertise. I'd very much appreciate if someone could point me to an end-user perspective on how to take a CD and get the music into an MP3 in a way that gets the best sound quality. For example, I have iTunes, and I can choose MP3. I can also choose bit rate. And, I can choose VBR. But, I don't know if it's LAME or not, and I don't know of it's apx, aps, or ap-anything else. I don't know the version number, or the compile. And, using iTunes, I don't know how to change any of these things. I'd be happy to go and purchase or download some other software, but I don't know what software to purchase or what to use that will give me the LAME, apx, aps, the versions, complies, and all this other stuff that will produce the optimal experience. Can anyone help me understand what to do and how I can get a user-oriented tool that will allow me to make MP3's with what's widely regarded to be the best quality?

Please don't double post here.