Interesting:

http://seanolive.blogspot.com/2010/06/some-new-evidence-that-generation-y.html

Does anybody here rip CDs on their own and encode to a codec of choice? Which software do you use?

Cuz I'm a geek who needs my collections, I still buy nearly everything on CD and then rip it to my iPod--but if I'm at home I still usually play it from my CD. But Ijust use iTunes (I do use 320 kps though). But I do have friends online who insist on ripping them as "lossless" flac files, etc, etc.

They probably insist on FLAC because you can convert it to a lossless format without the need to re-rip once a new version of the codec gets released or something like that. One of the arguments is that the computers are faster so you can compress to a higher level FLAC and the storage is cheap so space shouldn't be an issue.

I use EAC and rip to either MP3s or AAC.