Lossless (windows compatible) digital music file formats

[XB-70 Valkyrie]

I have ripped several hundred of my CDs to FLAC over the years using WinAmp. I am a bit tired of this software, and cannot, for the life of me, figure out how to turn off this bizarre volume-leveling feature. This feature causes any tiny tick on an LP (I record some of my LPs to CD) to cause the volume to drop off a cliff, and then sloooowly come back up. I have searched high and low through the menus and cannot find a way to turn it off. Annoying as hell.

In this day and age of dirt cheap hard drives, I wonder whether there is really much advantage of FLAC over WAV or Windows Media Audio Lossless. Windows Media Lossless is a new one for me, which I found by ripping a CD to MP-3 on Windows Media Player. Does anyone use this or recommend it? What are your thoughts on windows-compatible lossless formats in this day and age? Are there any portable players that will play them? Which are easist to trans-code to MP-3?

[amw]

WinAmp is not good in general. Use fb2k or EAC. (fb2k is probably the best all-around ripper, media player, library organiser & transcoder available.)

FLAC is the best format, pretty much, though I now rip everything to ALAC since VLC will play it just fine on windows and I can add it to my iTunes library on mac (switch between them with some frequency). But if that's not going to be an issue for you just use FLAC. Good hard drives are not exactly "dirt cheap" either, and you want to have multiple backups.

[RJR]

Stay away from Windows Lossless blah blah or you'll end up having to reconvert them one day to another format that was superior to it in the first place. Even then you might not be able to reconvert them because of Windows intrusive DRM.

Don't understand the problem with Winamp. Insert CD, open up Winamp, copy tracks into Winamp, Rip to Wav files using Diskwriter. Use FLAC to compress them afterwards to suit your tastes, needs.