Most of my music is 192kb. The music that I write, arrange and record is in AAC, Apple's lossless codec, at 320kb.

And that's not enough -- right now, I have about 120gb of music stored.

And that's exactly what I DON'T want to do. I have enough to do when I'm getting ready to travel. The last thing I want to do is sit down at a computer, load up some micro SD cards, and decide ahead of time what I will feel like listening to.

And that's you. Your listening habits are very different from mine. That's my whole point.

It's on long-haul flights that I am most dependent on my iPod for entertainment.

Once again, the point is to have my complete music collection accessible, not to merely fill time with music.

Yes, with the key words being, "in time." There is also the expense -- a 128 gig SDXC card is nearly $100.

And, once again, having to shut down my phone, open the back, remove the battery, swap tiny cards that can be easily dropped and lost, re-insert the battery, close the black and then wait for the phone to boot up is far, far more trouble than simply using my iPod. And that ignores the inconvenience of not being able to scroll through my entire library to decide what I want to listen to.

No, I do not, nor do I want to.

AS I said, this IS the Apple philosophy personified, i.e. "We know better than you do how you should be using this gear/software."

I have an Android phone. And I'll tell you when I use it, rather than the iPod: when I travel to somewhere I will rent a car and have to drive for a couple of hours, I'll put an audio book on it. I use it with a Motorola Sportster speakerphone that can receive audio via Bluetooth and transmit it via FM to the car radio. For me (and those are the operative words), that is far more convenient than using an iPod FM transmitter, particularly because I'm also using the phone's GPS for navigation and both the audio and the spoken directions come through the car's radio.

Using the phone as my music player? No thanks. The compromises that entails -- disassembling the phone to swap microSD cards, using lower bit-rates for music, and not having my entire collection in one place and browsable -- makes it completely unacceptable. If it works for you, that's great. It wouldn't work for me. My goal isn't to "dump iTunes" but to have my music, my way when I travel.

AAC is a lossy codec, and it's not Apple's. It's part of the MPEG-4 standard that is a successor to the MPEG-3 standard.

If you want lossless, use FLAC. But iTunes doesn't support it, of course. And it will greatly increase the size of your music collection on disk. People I know who use it say they can hear a pronounced difference between lossy and lossless encoding.

Maybe it's not AAC -- I'd have to look. Apple describes it as lossless, though who knows with them.

Is RockBox still around? That worked well for me, and if for some reason you wanted to, you could view photos on your Classic too.

It won't work on the Classic, but, yes, it's still around.

Amazingly, nobody seems to be making HDD Android MP3 players. The last one appears to have been the Archos 7:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Archos-7-160...item2336309ef8

Well, the iPod classic is an HDD player. I'm amazed that no one is making SSD players. An iPod Classic is around $250, street. I can buy an 160 gig SSD for around $100 street and on sale. How hard would it be to stick an SSD in an iPod Classic if the case were enlarged a bit?

Apparently, not that hard:

http://hackcorellation.blogspot.com/...onversion.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gldpulBPokY

http://www.head-fi.org/t/566780/offi...ssd-mod-thread

http://www.ifixit.com/Answers/View/5...ced+with+a+SSD

This is fantastic, thanks! I've got an old iPod 5th generation with a 60gig drive sitting around. This looks like a fun project. How nice it would be to have a 256gig drive inside!

Apparently, it's also possible to replace the OS on such devices as well, thus freeing you from @#$%@ iTunes at the same time.

I have a friend who's going through this exact dilemma right now, after the death of his beloved Creative MP3 player. He doesn't want to migrate to a phone-based solution for a few reasons, but he's having a heck of a time replacing it. And he won't go ipod, so he's sort of stuck.

I think iTunes is a superbly designed product. You just don't understand what it is designed for. You think it is a media management system. In reality it is trojan malware designed to make people think their Windows PC is broken and switch to a Mac ;)

If we're talking about listening on planes while drinking vodka, though, we really have to keep our perspective before insisting on 320kb AAC or FLAC. My biggest problem on a plane, Bose QC's or no, is dynamic contrast. Sure you can hear fortissimo just fine, bit pianissimo comes across as silence masked by engine drone. I'm pretty sure the last time I listened to Stravinsky on a plane - I thought the music had ended five minutes ago by the time it crashed back to life. Listening in the car isn't any better. I think high bitrate / lossless is great for sitting at home with a nice HiFi or a great set of earphones - but the devices in my travel arsenal are probably fine at 140kb.

I think you mean "dynamic range," not "dynamic contrast."

First of all, sample rate has nothing to do with dynamic range -- that is determined by bit depth which is completely unrelated. Next, the higher sample rate is going to give better clarity, particularly in the higher frequencies -- that is critical to listening in an environment with a lot of low-frequency rumble, like a plane. Finally, higher sample rates are essential for avoiding artifacts, resonances and harmonic distortition.

Sorry, but you're mistaken about the role of sample rate in musical reproduction.

I think fundamentally what I'm saying is that any nuanced difference will be undiscernible with all of the artificial noise in the environment.

Except that I have no trouble hearing the difference.