OGG can kiss my ass, personally, I've had it encode badly way too many times and lost too much work to that in the past, using both GW and Audacity on different computers.

It also doesn't play well with Winamp, which is my audio player of choice, especially when previewing the sound files  contained in my audio libraries in quick succession, since it's normally very fast on file load and program load, highly customizable, and can play  files in the other window with out refocusing every time a new one is played.

I don't know weather this is the fault of the file type it's self, or the coders that wrote the programs that I use to interact with it, but I get the feeling that it's half a dozen of one, 6 of the other, for all intents and purposes.

I like the idea of OGG in concept, and the size and quality control options are nice, but I find that a decent MP3 encoder like "LAME" produces more stable, and, to me, better sounding results, in about the same footprint, and in a far more universal file type that can be played by basically everything.

I use 44.1KHZ 16 Bit PCM WAV for incomplete projects, as well as high quality master versions of the completed product, but if I want a file to quickly share to someone for them to take a look at, it depends on the file in question, and I experiment a bit before hand with different quality to size ratios if I'm going to send it out to allot of people at once, but generally, I find that 192KBPS is a good quality cutoff, with 160KBPS usually being about the same, but sometimes not, depending, again, on the sound.

For instance, when I record speech from my screen reader to show a developer an error, and that's all that's coming through the card, I can usually get away with 96KBPS Mono, but if I'm listening to an audio book by graphic audio or a radio drama with high quality music and sound effects, I consider 192KBPS Stereo to be right around the point where I don't notice any distracting and annoying degradation that screws up my listening experience, and when I listen to trans and other electronic music that often takes advantage of the extreme left and right channels, and has allot of tonal variety throughout the spectrum, I like to have it in 320KBPS.

Hello,
I agree, I like ogg, mp3 and m4a as audio formats. Thanks to pitermach, I recently learned about saving a project as wav first then converting to ogg when it's complete, rather than saving as ogg constantly. It is very useful, although size wise it can get quite large, but worth it to keep the quality without crazy clipping and it suddenly going all low res sounding because well, the alst time I did this, I saved a work in progress file as ogg around ten times which degrades the quality more and more.