I've tended to rip+encode CDs over the last couple of years in Monkey's Audio format, primarily because when I chose MAC it was by far the most compressible lossless format. Purchasing a new cellphone with MP3/OGG support a few days ago has persuaded me to run a few tests on the MAC collection (over 200gb) to see if any of the newer lossless codecs are any better. At the moment the collection is stored on HDD, but I'll probably start backing it up on DVD-RW so I can use the diskspace for other stuff, and just keep lossy recordings on my HDD.
As I mentioned, I ran a few tests last night and generally, FLAC produces files about 20Mb larger over an album, La about 10Mb smaller than MAC. OptimFrog produces files even smaller, but it's too slow for practical use. I'm not all that bothered by encoding/decoding speed really - as long as it encodes at about 3.5x realtime or greater (that's about the speed I get with EAC when ripping, i.e. so that encoding one track finishes before the next .wav is ready to encode). System spec: dual athlon MP 2200+, so EAC and encoder can run on separate CPUs.
So, in the absence of anything producing as small/smaller files given the speed constraints I'm going to encode stuff in La from now on (and gradually re-encode the MAC stuff). However, I've spent a lot of time editing the tags and so on in the MAC files so that they're just so. Any ideas for a program that'll convert from MAC to La in a reasonably automated manner whilst preserving the data in the tags?