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Apple DRM-free music is in AAC. I encode my CDs in AAC. AAC sounds noticeably better than MP3 at the mid-range bitrates, even on my handheld. I already am going for higher bitrate (e.g. 192 kbit) AACs and to get acceptable sounding MP3s, I need at least as much bitrate, if not more. And I still know the quality has dropped.
Re-encoding my music is simply frustrating. I suppose if I had software that dynamically re-encoded the music files as they synced from the playlist, I would be less annoyed. But keeping two copies*of my whole library, or re-encoding everything every time I want to sync a new playlist, that just sucks.
You guys are making a ton of excuses for something that should be a non-issue. AAC playback is trivial. There's solid open source libraries for both encoding and decoding it. The standard is open. It is even built into WM6 with WMP.
The problem is not AAC as a format so much. The problem is that none of the software decodes the metadata.
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