What should I rip my CDs as???

WMA and AAC are a little then MP3 at low bit rates like 128, but there's no need to be messing about with such small files these days, with the cost of storage so low.

I would recommend ripping to 192kbps as a minimum. This provides excellent quality for most people.

At decent sizes like this the difference in sound quality between formats is negligible. Some people that would even argue that mp3 gives the best quality at this size.

mp3 is the clear way to go because it is the most widely supported, both in software and portable mp3 players. I never ever use any proprietry audio formats.

By the way do not use iTunes for ripping to mp3. It has a poor quality ripper. Use the LAME encoder you can get with Exact Audio Copy or dbPowerAmp.

If you are reripping your collection and have plenty of disk space you might consider ripping to a lossless format. Lossless format have EXACTLY the same sound as the original cd, at about 70% of the size.

I am currently in the process of reripping my collection to FLAC, as it is supported on my player and sounds amazing. Once I have ripped a few albums I use dbPowerAmp to create a second copy of the files as 256kbs mp3s.

Because it is converting from a lossless format, the quality is exactly as if I had ripped it from the cd again. This way I have 2 copies of my collection, all properly named and tagged, at different sizes, for half the work.

If in the future I want to use a different lossy format, such as Ogg, instead of the mp3s, I can do it with a few mouse clicks and leave it running overnight one night.

I think that if you have had success with WMA then you should stick with it, but for me personally, 96 kbps WMA is good enough for me. I can't really tell a difference between CD and mp3/WMA. I think that the difference between mp3 and WMA at high bitrates is probably non existant. If you're not satisfied with 128 kbps then re-rip (if you have the CD) to 160 or 192 kbps WMA. If you dont have the CD then stick with what you have, transcoding takes away quality. I dunno about iPod becoming a PlaysForSure Device, Apple just put Intels and Windows in their iMacs, why not freeze the rest of hell over and make it a PFS Device?