Ogg is the best sounding lossy codec, IMO. I use mainly APE (very similar to FLAC) for lossless on my home setup, and convert to OGG for my handheld. Unless you have some real dynamite headphones, I don’t think 99 out of 100 people could differentiate between a good OGG rip and FLAC on a handhelp with headphones, so for mobile purposes, it’s worth the sacrifice to save the space.
That’s one feature I like in JRMC…I keep my entire library encoded in lossless…but when I plug in my fuze, it’ll synchronize playlists of my choice automatically, and it’ll convert them to my codec of choice on the fly as it’s doing it. So I keep large, high qual files on my 8 TB raid server at home, and can easily and quickly load any other format on the fly on my fuze without having to waste drive space on lower quality formats on my handheld. I’m sure there’s other media progs that do that too, but JRMC was one of, if not the first, so I got locked into them quite awhile ago so I quit researching others too much.
Agreed on many modern CDs being recorded lousy. Don’t know if I could go back and do any forensic work on them all though…70,000 files would be a bit too much work, IMO. That’s also why I’m hesitant to mess with any other player with syncing my fuse…rebuilding that library would be daunting. I keep backups of the backups in different places because I don’t want to have to redo all of that.