Is DRM-Free Music Worth It?

From Christopher Breen, Macworld:

Unprotected music tracks—those without digital rights management (DRM)—offer the advantage that you can legally using them without the same restrictions as other tracks. So, for example, you could incorporate them into personal projects such as slide shows and movies made with applications other than Apple’s. (Apple’s iLife suite can use protected iTunes tracks, but programs made by companies such as Adobe, for example, can’t.) But other than their unrestricted use, how do they compare sonically with the protected form? Most DRM-free music is encoded at a high bit rate and is therefore less compressed than standard digital music files. But will you be able to tell the difference between the protected and unprotected version (much less, those versions and one ripped directly from a CD in an uncompressed format)?

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