Thanks for all of the good information.
I bought an iPod Classic (80 gig) last night. So far, so good. I was able to turn off most of the annoying things about iTunes. I configured it to rip CDs to MP3s at 192KBits/s and I pointed it to an external hard drive for storage, so I’m not sucking up resources on the laptop. iTunes updated the firmware when I connected the iPod and the wheel is more responsive.
My only gripe about iTunes is a minor one. When it fetches tags and creates folders on my hard drive, it sometimes finds slightly different artist names and creates two folders and spilts the tracks into the two folders. For example, on a Duke Ellington CD, some tracks have Duke Ellington as artist and others have Duke Ellington and His Orchestra. So, the CD ends up partially in one folder and partially in another.
I figured out how to fix this. In iTunes, do a “Get Info” and change the artist name to be consistent. iTunes moves the tracks into one folder if you’ve configured it to “Manage your music”.
I’m thinking the harddrive based player (most of the Sandisk ones are flash ROM) was a better idea for me, because it looks like I’ll be using 8-10 gig by the time I’ve ripped all of my current CDs. One of my goals was to have everything on one player and not have to move stuff on and off.
It looks like the generation 5 chargers will work (but I didn’t try). I still have a question about using an audio (RCA plug) cable in the docking port connector. I know apple blocked the video out unless the receiving device is “Apple approved” but I don’t know about the audio. It would be nice to plug this up to a stereo. But, it that’s not possible, I can make an adapter to plug it up through the earphone jack.