ive used about half of my 30gb and i have close to 2000 songs....ripped into mp3....lossless would definately shorten how many songs you may be able to hold on your ipod.

 

It definitely is one of those quality vs. quanitity issues but imho I can't tell the difference. My friend got a 30gb when I got my 60gb and he went lossless and had it full in a month. I, on the other hand, have been encoding at 256 for about a year and half and am at 5200 songs which take sup about 30.8gb.

Obviously a personal taste debate, but 5200 songs, well all I can say is

Oh yeah and I am huge album art whore, if I put a best of album on it I'll go and find all the original albums those tracks were released on just for variety..

 

Oh yeah I forgot to mention that I previously had a alpine 9856 with the full speed cable and all I did was put it on shuffle. Of course within the first 6 months of owning the alpine I literally wore off the graphic on the fast foward button..

 

Nothing special, just got it from Best Buy....they did give me a $30 gift card with it.....which I used the next day for some extra speaker wire



As for whether its worth it.....being that it navigates exactly like an iPod, I can get around pretty quickly. I REALLY like the option to disable the stupid crap (for me) like audiobooks, composers, etc. from the Alpine search menu.