(Tab's post is the motivation for this, but rather than step on his topic, I'll just start a new thread.)
Anecdote: when I transfer music from my CDs to my portable devices, I copy the WAV files. Why bother to compress them? It's a waste of time when I have a gigabyte or more of space on even the smallest of flash drives. Seriously, who needs MP3s (or ALAC or WMA or whatever) ?
MP3 files - and compressed music in general - are an artifact of a bygone era that was marked by dialup-grade bandwidth and storage measured in megabytes. These limitations are rapidly disappearing and are no longer an issue for many of us. From a practical standpoint, there is no reason for consumers to settle for compression except that it is what the new industry is selling us - the same way they sold us CDs and LPs and then complained when we decided we wanted better. (Wireless tech may be an exception to this statement, but only temporarily.)
It's probably too much to expect the the consuming public to start demanding their online music in CD-grade, DVD-grade, or even HD-grade uncompressed files. It would be nice if one of the major or even secondary sellers would start offering them, but it's not in their interest at the moment. For myself, I plan to start preserving whatever WAVs (meaning CDs) in the event that uncompressed music disappears along with music CDs themselves.
I'm not bringing up the lossless/quality issue since it's really beside the point. On the one hand, I'm not sure I believe the lossless claims. Music is experiential: lossless in a mathematical sense may not be the same as lossless to the person who is listening. (Of course, this argument was made against digital sampling when CDs first came on the market.)
But the real point is this: even if it does sound exactly the same after compression, why bother? This isn't like the analog-to-digital conversion 25 years ago. All we're really dealing with is a change in delivery methods (hard copy vs soft copy). The technology may have limited us at one time, but there is no reason to make the extra effort after those limitations are gone.


