No and no. ipod's can basicly play any format except for WMA's. These include wave, M4A, ACC, MP3, along with a few other ones. As far as when you rip a cd (import it onto your computer) it depends what program you use and what your prefrences are. If you import them using windows media player, I am pretty sure that you can only import them as WMA's, however, that is really the only program that does it in that format. iTunes defults under ACC when you first download the program, but in 2 seconds, in prefrences, you can change the format to MP3, apple lossless, AFF, ACC, or WAV. Also, if you have WMA's on your computer, you can have it search for them, and it will make a copy of the WMA's in MP3 or what ever format you want. It really is a very easy program to use, and if your connected to a network, the streaming of other peoples music can be extremly useful for finding new artists to add to your collection. Out of the 260 artists in my collection, I probally have only heard of 80 or so before this year. The rest I found just browsing other peoples music (iTunes allows you to look at other peoples music, then steam it letting you listen to a CD quality full preview of the song. Then you can use progams like myTunes or ourTunes to actually download the actual song. This is all only if your on a network where others use iTunes)
What everyone thinks about iPods is you can only put music purchased from the iTunes music store. This isn't true. Out of the 4217 songs I have, 2 have been taken from the iTunes music store, and that was for the Pepsi giveaway.
Another cool thing about iPods is the audio books. You can download audio books from either bitTorrent sites, P2P sites, or actually pay for them from big sites. If it is in M4B, then with an iPod, you can play as much or as little as you want, then press pause, play a million songs inbetween, come back in a month and pick up exactly where your left off (aka bookmarking) Also, you can slow down or speed up the text rate.
