[thearrow3456]

I second the Rockbox'ed iPod approach.

I've had rockbox on my 5.5g for a while now, and I absolutely love it.

The nice features about rockbox:

-Lossless format support
-Drag and Drop audio in a folder and play using the file browser.
-Customizable EQ
-Noise reduction in quiet parts of the song over the apple firmware (at least in my case)
-Crossfeed for headphone listening!
-Customizable While Playing Screen
-Crossfade between skipped tracks
-Remaining battery life estimation
-Full backlight/brightness/fading control
-Other games/apps/jpeg viewer/txt viewer/mpeg viewer
-Etc, Etc. the list goes on and on. If you thought the apple firmware was great, Rockbox somehow still manages to improve upon it.

If you have a ton of music already on the iPod like I did, you can convert the iTunes/iPod database into the rockbox database format. Then you can use whichever firmware you want to play your music.