I fear that I will be inciting one of the Internet's most wicked Flame Wars since the days of Mac/Pc, IE/Netscape or even emacs/vi but I have to ask you all this:
I have encoded music in MP3, in WMA and OGG. Many of the players out there (TCMP and Pocket Player for example) will handle all of these types, but which one is best for the Axim? I have read web sites that say don't use WMA due to poor quality but I tried creating a song in each(MP3, WMA and OGG) last night and I honestly couldn't tell the difference on my Ax...is the audio chip in the Ax not Responsive? or is my ear bad? Or are there a ton of audiophiles arguing about nothing when they compare music standards?

Well i'm no audiophile... you should see my cd collection

but I go for MP3... not for audiophonic reasons but for this one. My Axim, My (now retired) palm, my CD player, My DVD, MrsPsionandys MP3 player, My phone and computers can all play MP3.. some can play wmp.. some can play Ogg but everyrthing plays mp3. It just makes life easier for me.
(although the other formats do have some plus points that i'm missing out on by doing it this way)


Although the real audiophiles are arguing about which codec to use i suspect)

This week I have been mostly listening to..... Short cummings audio

Life — In Funny, Six-Minute Slices

     

Popular opinion (and in fact there is even some evidence!) suggests that OGG is the superior format of the three, but it's also the least widely accepted of the three.

MP3 - Will play on anything, probably the lowest quality unless you use an exceptional encode (like LAME).
WMA - Will play on nearly anything and tends to have better sound than MP3, especially at low bit rates.
OGG - Much more limited playback but tends to sound even better than WMA.

If you can't hear any difference then that's something to keep in mind. Also consider that you don't want to convert your music, you should be re-ripping from the source.

Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.

   

I convert all my songs to OGG VBR 64kbps. Still sounds ok and save space.

Thanks. I appreciate the responses, I guess I will stick with WMA and MP3 for my purposes since my ear can't tell the difference between the three formats and (I hate this reason, but it's true) Windows Media is free/already there and works for my purposes. My Linux friends will make me return my hacker credentials for that last bit.

my library is so huge. 8 GB for about 1500 songs. I have friends who have 2 gb and 2500 songs.


I need to make my songs lower bitrate. Can anyone tell me the best sounding, least space-taking format/bitrate?> It would be good if you could tell me video too.

Ogg format is definitely the best sounding, smallest format. 1 cd can take as little as 16MB!
You can encode your video with ogg sound and mpeg video to make it pretty small. TCPMP will play it.

OGG is the best. Supported by TCMP, Pocket Music and GSPlayer.