irateplatypus: i notice exactly what you state here. People seem to be against it due to its price, but my main thing is not the price of the hardware, but show me an mp3 player with a UI just as nice. I have looked at all of the ones mentioned here, but they all seem to fall short with me. I could never bring myself to pay 300$ for the hardware in the ipod alone. It is the UI that is nice. A circular thumbpad is genius! a few quick turns and you can be through the entire list of 1000.
maleficent: that is one thing I would need to do. Go back through my mp3s (and rip my audio cds that I havent gotten around to yet) and make playlists for each album, then each genre, then just a massive one when I don't care
i have been slack at that just because I usually use a file manager and just click on everything i want to listen to.
JStrider: I am with you on that count, I don't want software to start changing things because it "thinks" I would prefer it that way. The ipod gets around that by being a Mass Storage unit. If you plug it in it reads as an external hard drive with all the goodies that entails. I really doubt I would install itunes if I bought an ipod. That is mainly to my dislike of large programs that do things that I really don't need to have done.