At what level of quality should I rip my audio selections and still maintain reasonable file sizes?

A. When you archive your audio CD collection, you'll want to save yourmusic in the highest possible quality and still preserve disk space. Iused to use 160Kbps MP3 files, but more recently, I switched to 128KbpsWindows Media Audio (WMA) format, which provides better sound quality inless disk space. That format is great for music you play off your harddisk, but what about portable devices, where space is at an even greaterpremium? Modern media players--such as Media Player for WindowsXP--include a feature called transcoding that lets you compress musicfurther when you copy it to a portable device, such as SonicBlue Rio,Iomega HipZip, or Pocket PC. So you can store music at 128Kbps on yourhard disk, for example, then transcode it to your portable device at64Kbps or another speed. That way, you can have your cake and eat it,too--on the road.