I have 7875 songs for 22.7 days of music @ 45.21 gigs of file space. I have the 40gig iPod. The key is smart playlists! I have an iPod-loader that selects all songs rated 3 stars or higher. Then I have other playlists, like songs not played in over a year, songs played only once (it took some time to listen to each song, now I have to listen to them all again,) 5 star, 4 star, 3 star lists, etc. etc. This way I can rotate through all my music more evenly than what happens when I go to pick out a CD, and I can select the most important music to fit. Of course, when you delete all the holiday music, I can almost fit everything onto the 30 (really ~36gigs.) And then when we went to Europe for 2 weeks I had to delete all of my NIN and Metallica (cleared ~2gigs) so I could transfer all the digital images we were taking onto the iPod. I would be a music-phile, however.