Call me crazy, but lossless audio isn't the holy grail of music listening. Here's my opinion on the hierarchy of audio formats.

Of course the Sansa supports most of the common compression formats. So the ultra noob question is, what is the absolute EASIEST, fewest steps to do a Commercial CD to what ever compression format ...

Microsoft has been teasing the native support for compressed file formats -- 7-Zip and TAR archives-- for a while and the support has finally started arriving to users.