I was a huge fan of MP3 until I prop­erly dis­covered AAC a few months ago. Essen­tially, AAC provides bet­ter qual­ity at lower bitrates — allow­ing you to save loads of hard drive space. The only prob­lem is that there aren’t that many devices and play­ers out there that sup­port AAC whereas vir­tu­ally everything sup­ports MP3. As it hap­pens, though, I only use iTunes and my trusty iPod to play my music — both of which sup­port AAC.

I’ve now had a few months to adjust to AAC and I’ve had no hic­cups at all. I’ve com­pressed my entire col­lec­tion to 96kbps (vari­able) AAC and can’t dis­tin­guish it between CD qual­ity. Of course, you may not have the same exper­i­ence as me and I heav­ily recom­mend that you do a bit of ABX test­ing before you com­mit to any compression.

I recom­mend any­one who listens to their music col­lec­tion on devices that do sup­port AAC, to con­vert their col­lec­tion to AAC.