ok you kind of lost me there....so in a sense....it runs all tunes together then.

yeah, pretty much.

I'm upgrading once I figure out what to have engraved on the back...

Company discount + a gift card will bring it to me for around $300 even...

In the new Itunes there is a checkbox in the "Get Info" window that you select if you want the album you're ripping to be gapless. I'm not sure what happens if you just made everything gapless - would it really be a problem on normal album tracks?

Note to non-5G Ipod users who want to use Itunes 7 - there's a bug, I assume it's a bug, where Itunes will attempt to find the gapless information on your Ipod's songs pretty much EVERY time you add something to your Ipod and you have no control over it except to click the little X in the window at the top. There is no setting that I've seen that turns this option off even though the only model that can use the gapless info is the 5th gen Ipod. I really hope Apple fixes this quick because it's already becoming a nightmare - I've had this stupid gapless thing go off no less than 8 times tonight as I dragged things over to my Ipod.

I am curious to know approximately how many albums I could fit on an 80gb iPod. I really want one that will hold all the cds I have. I have around 550 cds.

80gb is more than enough room to fit 550 discs, even if you encode the mp3s at the highest quality.

So basically, taking into account the double albums and a few boxsets, I should be good even if I end up with 600 or so albums in a year or two.

I would say so. My high quality rips average around 100mb, and I have around 600 albums on my 60gb mp3 player.

My 40gb has 31.6 gb used right now and has 494 albums on it, if that gives you an indication. All albums are ripped as 192kBps mp3s. At that quality, you should have room for plenty more. And if you use Apple's format at 160, you'll get the same quality at a slightly smaller file size and get even more on there (but no one will want your files.)

Anyone figure out how to solve this issue yet? It's a major pain.

i'm in at 60 gig. i have noticed the gapless thing every time but have yet [knock knock knock] to really see any problem with it.