Digital music's great divide

Helpfully for online music fans (who may not be technophiles), the New York Times has the "Basics" today on digital music's big file-format divide - the one between Apple's AAC format (found at iTunes and played in iPods) and Microsoft's WMA format (found at Rhapsody, Yahoo Music, etc. and played on non-iPod players). In between is the more agnostic MP3 format, but not the default one for any of the services and thus a pain to convert to. The Times says "the safest strategy, and one popular among audio purists, is to purchase music on compact discs and rip it to the MP3 format," but read the whole article to understand why. And here's the Washington Post on the sound quality of AAC, WMA, and MP3.