Noob question here: Going to rip all my ablums, what format should I use?

[BongFish]

i garentee that FLAC sounds Soooooo much better than any lossy format, you hear subtle thigns you miss in MP3's and you don't get errors or glitches at all.

It's widely accepted that 99.5% of MP3's encoded at ~205kBps VBR (aka --alt-preset standard) are transparent (ie you can't tell the difference from CD).

People moan about artifacts etc but you need very good equipment and TRAINING to hear most of them, it's crazy. I say stick with MP3, at high bitrates it sounds fine and gives you 1:7 compression. Lossless will give you 60% compression max.