I use WMP 10 as my default player, but yes I've been downloading songs with a bitrate of 128, since I still intend to put those on iPod (if and when I can ever get the blasted thing to work-it hasn't worked right since I updated iTunes [it's not the iPod itself, it's iTunes that's causing the problem]). I'm sure I could go for a much higher bitrate, and sometimes I do.