I don't have endless HDD space, so was thinking of using ogg CD images (with cue) rather than FLAC.

I am going to use a Squeezebox2 with a Cambridge Audio 640a AMP and Mission 701 speakers. I will also be burning some CD's from these images and using Foobar's convert feature to MP3's for my MP3 player.

Please tell me why or why not i should do this?

I cannot really answer your question, but I had the same problem. Now, I use wavpack lossy in the 400 kbps range.

You might consider generating FLAC's at the start of your ripping process, then generating OGG and MP3 by batch once you are satisfied with the tags that have been established. From that point, delete the FLAC's to save space. Something like this would be the way I would approach a limited disk space situation. At the end of this process I would have lossy encoded files that did not suffer lossy-to-lossy transcoding artifacts and, for efficiency, I could modify my batches to be as large as possible but fit inside my limited disk space.

Or we could add space, but I am assuming with the above that purchasing more space is out of the question.

Why -q10 if you are going to do this *and* especially if you're short of disk space?

Because it's still about a third the size of FLAC files.

I would rip what i can now to flac and add more hard disk space when i can. Seems more sensible to have it there so you dont have to re-rip in the future.

My ears (normal ones, in their twenties) with my headphones (K-55) find -q 6 transparent. I keep FLAC archives for the same reason I keep PNG archives of the output of my digital camera: perfectionism, hating the very fact that my original data has been tampered with.

Vorbis -q 10 gives you a nominal bit rate of 500 kbit/s, scratching the lower regions of what you get with FLAC. Effectively, this means that your file savings over FLAC aren't very large.

are really do not see the benefit of using that high of bit rate when q6 is transparent for almost everyone. If you are going to use a lossy because of space, then don't go with overkill on q10 if you cannot even tell the difference.

I agree, there's not much of a point in using lossy for such high bitrates. One thing you could do is rip to both Vorbis -q5 AND mp3, together they should still take less space than -q10 and it removes the need of transcoding to your player. But ripping to a lossless format and using that for transcoding as you like is very highly recommended, even if you don't have enough space for all your cd's right now.

Hmm.. 500 vs the typical 800k is around 40% difference. Come on that is a huge difference.

Q10 is nonsense in my opinion. Bitrate is much higher that say Q6 but still doesn't have the advantages of lossless encoding. Go either for lossless or lossy at sane bitrates...

Wavpack lossy might be a good compromise at these "in between" bitrates.