AAC or AppleLossless

Tvad, the post is about using a computer as a music server, nobody has mentioned anything about using an iPod.

Pardales, the only advantage of the AAC format is that it can compress down to smaller files sizes. Compared to non-compressed or Apple Loseless there is a penalty in sound quality. It's a value judgement whether that trade-off is acceptable, but if you're using a 500Gb HD where you can store approximately 700 (non-compressed) to 1,400 (Apple Loseless) CDs. Is your music collection so large that it cannot fit on one or two 500Gb drives?

Not at all. My entire collection will easily fit on this 500Gb drive with no problem. So, I am not asking about this because of space issues. I am really only interested in the best quality. Apple Lossless it sounds like?

Pardales, all 54 gigs of my iPod hard drive are songs in Apple Lossless. For what it's worth, that's about 2500 tunes...some are a minute long, some are classical or jazz pieces that last 17 minutes. Most are average, about 3-5 minutes in length.

With the standard earphones, I had trouble discerning Lossless from AAC. But as soon as I got my Shure e5c earphones, it was obvious (to my ears) how much better Lossless really was.

I even did it double-blind, by burning versions of the same song in both formats and having a friend select between them. I correctly identified and preferred the Lossless every time.

Hope this helps,
Brian