Hey I was just wondering what some of you do who own iPods, and want to make good use of storage room, but are also shooting for good quality? So far I am still just keeping my mp3s at 192, and using MP3Gain to eliminate clipping.

the key here is good smart playlists as far as i am concerned

...or just reap the rewards of excellent progress in codecs as the recent 128k tests have shown. Not too long ago most of us laughed at the claims of 128 being "Near CD quality". That claim is coming closer to reality than some realize.

That being said, I'm almost finished converting all my FLAC/CUE images to 160k VBR iTunes encoded stuff for my 60GB 5th gen iPod. A special "Thanks!" to Otto for his iTunesEncode.exe...makes life so easy with Foobar and iTunes.

All my new rips happen to iTunes AAC at 160VBR. However, I'm lazy, and so I've not really taken the time to rerip the vast majority of my LAME aps encodes.

For iPod use, I like iTunes AAC, but the space savings is just not enough to overcome my massive laziness.

I rip to FLAC and transcode to LAME -V6 which provides more than enough quality for me for a portable player.