Of course that would be the best options, but not everyone has a hard drive big enough to store it all. I have an 80gb hard drive and even having files as mp2 and mp3 that is already half full, and if I had tried to use flac or shn or something it would have been full long ago.

It's not just hard drive space though, playing such big files is not always good when trying to run lots of programs at once as the songs often pause and skip because they can't load into memory at the same time as all of your programs.

Until now I've ripped all of my CD's to MP2 384kbps to try to keep them as high quality as possible, but now I think I will go back and do them to Ogg instead.