Re: For the love of sweet baby jesus
What you're forgetting is that MP3 *does* lose something in the encoding/decoding process. Whether that's audible is a moot point, but for many people, shelling out money on a compromised version when a perfectly good CD is available isn't going to sell.
There's little of no *need* to use MP3 these days as storage capacities have exploded and download speeds increased - the space saving part of the compromise is no longer any real benefit.
I'm quite happy to listen to 320K MP3 and I recognise that my old ears probably wouldn't hear the difference between that and FLAC but if was going to spend hours ripping my CD collection (and I have done a fair few disks) then it would be to FLAC and not MP3 because there's no point it deliberately throwing out some of the information forever.