BloggingITGuy is right you do not get 50% reduction. Not meaning to knitpick but you don't do as bad as 65-75% either. Apple claims 52%. I just did 40 CDs at 55% and I saw another review that says they got 58%. That's significant if storage is limited and trivial if you have a Tbyte hard disk. I suspect as storage cost/Gb keeps going down we will either store more and more and/or give up compression. There's a lot of personal preference working here. Some of us don't like to waste space and if ALC is bit for bit as good as uncompressed why not do it? The last time I digitized all my CDs I did them uncompressed because I wanted bit for bit archival copies. Depends on your mood. Something deep down inside me says that uncompressed is the original and correct state even though I know there's no difference from FLAC or ALC.

Paladin: you are opening a huge can of worms. Audiofiles believe that not all ones and zeros were created equal and then the invoke things like jitter to further fog the output from inexpensive players. If you are using digital out just about any modern transport will do a pretty darn good job. I don't want to start an argument with audiophiles--I'm sure they agree that the DAC and subsequent pre-amp out stages are more important than the transport. But consider this. When you copy a CD to a hard drive the copying program makes a bit-perfect copy by redundant sampling. Once you have that copy on a disk, if you play it back through a USB port (as described by Avlis above) you essentially eliminate all jitter. You certainly eliminate any playback errors or distortion when you play a disk file. May be one of the reasons iPods and MP3 players sound better than they ought to. May also explain why people who rip DVDs to hard disks and play them in the HTPCs say they video is better. Makes sense to me.