Well, this is my first post as a new owner of a pair of M80s, so hello.
Anyways, I'm running a Squeezebox duet hooked up to my 3808ci (had the SB prior). All my music is stored on a Linux box in the bedroom, encoded in FLAC (compression level 8). I encoded to lossless when I lost all my MP3s ripped via Exact Audio Copy.
Another good reason to go lossless is that if a new format comes out, you can transcode to the new format without any degradation in quality. Converting a format that's compressed to another compressed format will result in degraded quality. The alternative would be popping in all your CDs again to rip to the new format. . .done that, been there. Not a fun experience.
If you haven't checked it out yet, look at dBpoweramp. It will let you rip to FLAC, tag your music from four different sources (including Album art), and comes with a utility to transcode all your music to other formats. It's not free but was worth the fifty bucks for me personally.
Whatever ripper you choose, makes sure it does "secure" rips. Do it once the right way. Unless you periodically enjoy ripping your library for weeks on end.
