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I have always been amazed at how many people invest thousands of dollars in equipment, and then do nothing toward treating the listening room. If you want to invest wisely in creating a good sounding system, put money into acoustic treatments and audition lots of speakers. Treating the room and buying good speakers will do more toward creating a enjoyable listening experience than spending hours playing with various bit rates on MP3s.
Here is a good list as to what's important when choosing a sound system, as posted on the AVS Forum by Arny Krueger, who invented the ABX comparator and conducted hundreds of blind listening tests between amplifiers, receivers, CD players, cables, you name it.
Components vary greatly in their potential to change the sound of a system. The order of probable change is:
(most probable)
The recording you are playing
The room
The speakers
(beyond here probability is zero or near zero for good components)
Amplifiers
Signal processors unless you change default adjustments
Signal sources, particularly if connected via digital lines
Cables
(least probable)
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What's a good program to rip FLAC - I had one suggested to me and downloaded (it was free and worked well), but then had a break in and my laptop was stolen (BASTARDS!!!!!), and so I no longer have the program, the email that suggested it....
Any suggestions?
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Apple lossless into iTunes. I must say that one of iTunes' most useful features is that it will down encode your high sample rate rips into a lower quality for your iPods and iPhones so you don't use up all the space as a result. Sadly a major factor when deciding not to get a smartphone that isn't an iPhone. Lame I know.
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Hard drives are so cheap these days that there's not much point in using a lossy codec for archive use.
Agreed. They're also quite large now and, as I prefer to stick to "CD-perfect" files for archive, I use EAC to rip to 44.1 KHz, 16-bit WAV. I then export them via Audacity to 320 kbps VBR MP3s for my player.
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My Library consists almost entirely of 320 kbps mp3. That fits a TON of music on one computer! But I also have a "Soundtrack Cues Hall of Fame" that my brothers and I came up with and update each year. And for those special files, I also have them in Apple Lossless. More recently with the purchase of an external cloud hard-drive, I've started ripping a .WAV copy of each CD just for backup.
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I rip to ALAC using XLD, which checks the rips against online databases for accuracy and tells you if there's any issues. (This is handy because if there's a scratch or a skip in a file you'll know immediately instead of having to listen to every album you rip to make sure it's good.) Then I use Jaikoz to embed metadata into each file. (Something iTunes doesn't do very well.)
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You know at first I thought this had something to do with eating pork and beans around a camp fire.
Moi aussi, Monsieur Porpoise Academy! 
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I normally rip/encode on a Mac and I end up ripping it twice, with the first pass for my typical usage with portable devices (which typically bring with them suboptimal acoustic listening experiences anyways, e.g., in car, bus, public) and the second pass for archival (that way I don't cry for too long if they burn in an unexpected fire).
== Pass 1 ==
I use iTunes to rip and encode to 128kbps ABR MPEG-4 AAC (it's the default "AAC Encoder" settings). For me, this has the optimal performance to size ratio so I can put a lot of music on my portable devices and the quality is CD-like to me with the equipment and environment I use these in. This MPEG-4 format is supported nearly as well as MP3 (aka MPEG-1, Layer 3) on devices and produces better output at lower bitrates than MP3 and typically requires less power consumption from the portable devices for playback than MP3. Additionally, its licensing is less prohibitive than MP3.
== Pass 2 ==
I use XLD with Secure Ripper (supports AccurateRip database) to rip to FLAC, although now that ALAC is open source that should suffice, too, for long-term archival. Then, I use MusicBrainz Picard for the tagging.
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