I was just wondering what you lot would recommend for, say, converting music purchased off music stores like iTunes or Napster etc.

I've had a bit of a dilemma as to whether to do my music collection with 3.90.3 or 3.96.1, lol. I don't have state-of-the-art £200+ speakers or headphones though.

Re-encoding a lossy encode with a second lossy encoder is always not recommended.

That said, it probably doesn't matter which version of LAME you use. It's not like you're shooting for absolute transparency.

Re-encoding is ALWAYS not recommended...

You will not obtain better quality of your songs transcoding them to Lame or another good quality mp3 encoder. On the contrary, they will lost quality. It's better leave them as they are.

Okaaaaaay....... most people, however, might want to re-encode or whatever in order to rid themselves of the irritatingness of the DRM mechanism.

Especially in the case with WMA where there doesn't appear to be a working utility that strips the DRM and leaves you with a "classic" WMA of sorts?

Is there a chance anybody will successfully crack the WMA DRM scheme and make a Hymn-like tool oneday?

I believe some older versions of wma have been cracked, though there might be newer versions i just can't be bothered with wma.They use
unf**k (believe me that's what it is called) remove the stars and replace with UC
freeme
that's all i know maybe you should do some reasearching yourself