AAC isn't as proprietary is it looks. It's the same compression technology used for Dolby Digital audio on DVDs.
That said, MP3 is perfectly fine if slightly less efficient. While several players on the market besides the iPod support AAC now, I don't bother with AAC except for iTunes Music Store tracks.
I don't rip in iTunes anymore, though. I use Exact Audio Copy (http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/) to rip the disk and pipe the output to LAME (http://lame.sourceforge.net/index.php) to compress it to 175k variable bit rate ("V3" in LAME parlance) MP3. Then I drag and drop the tracks into my iTunes library.
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That said, MP3 is perfectly fine if slightly less efficient. While several players on the market besides the iPod support AAC now, I don't bother with AAC except for iTunes Music Store tracks.
I don't rip in iTunes anymore, though. I use Exact Audio Copy (http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/) to rip the disk and pipe the output to LAME (http://lame.sourceforge.net/index.php) to compress it to 175k variable bit rate ("V3" in LAME parlance) MP3. Then I drag and drop the tracks into my iTunes library.