The Ups and Downs of Audio Format Selection

The digital music revolution was supposed to make our lives easier, wasn’t it? Music that follows you wherever you go, easy-to-use playlists, massive amounts of tunes in the palm of your hand—it all sounds so deliciously enticing until you try to decide what form you want that digital music to take. Do you want your music stored in lossy or lossless format? What does that even mean? Is disk-space more important to you than sound quality? Or would you rather have better sound, at the expense of being able to store fewer songs. Or are both of those qualities secondary to being able to rip (or buy) your music once and play it on virtually any audio device you can get your hands on?