Twain offer: )1) I give you ten thousand dollars, and I get to tell you beginning to end how to spend it - you have no say. )2) I give you seven thousand dollars, and you get to spend it however you please - no strings attached. Which will you choose? AAC, WMV - these are DRM [digital rights [theirs, not yours] management] enabled codecs. These are worthless, especially since the gains they may or may not offer over other codecs is at best marginal. For lossy compression, it's ogg all the way. For lossless, it's oggflac, or some other flac. Just because apple is popular doesn't make them just as lockdown as microsoft. Remember that there are people who risk prison so that users can play their iTunes songs wherever they want whenever they want. Were it only up to apple, you would play it on only one single pod, period. AAC may be nice, but it offers nothing shocking over other premium codecs that are free of corporate control. The same issues exist with other apple doings. The sorenson codec especially that is associated with quicktime video has been problematic from a DRM standpoint. Bless the smart people who back engineered this codec so that the world could view content with their choice of player. /end rant. --gcr