What's the "best" format in which to rip music, From a compression:quality ratio Options

[mipadi]

I've been ripping quite a few old CDs lately, and I wondered what you guys thought was the best format for ripping music in terms of a compression:quality ratio.

Historically, I've ripped music at 192kbps MP3. MP3 is a familiar, widespread format, of course, and 192kbps seems to offer the best compression:quality ratio. Obviously I could go higher than 192kbps, but from what I've read -- and heard for myself -- ripping at a higher quality doesn't really matter for the MP3 format (e.g., 192kbps sounds a lot better than 128kbps, 256kbps doesn't sound that much better than 192kbps).

Obviously ripping to WAV or something without compression would retain CD-quality music, but that would quickly fill up my available HDD space, so it's not a feasible option. Second best would be a lossless compression codec like Apple Lossless (I use iTunes), but Apple Lossless files are bigger than a compressed format, and that causes battery performance issues on portable players like an iPod. (Bigger files means less of a file can be loaded into cache, which means the hard drive has to be accessed more frequently, resulting in decreased battery life.) Plus I'll probably most listen to my music on an iPod, which doesn't output extremely high-quality audio anyway.

So for the time being, I decided on 256kbps stereo AAC with variable bit-rate encoding, which seems to offer the best compression:quality ratio, but I wondered if anyone else had any suggestions.