If you don't want to pay the $500 price tag, or the contracts and monthly payments, than iPod Touch is the way to go. It can do everything the smart phones can do, yes there is even an app to make phone calls. Best part is, you only pay once, and it so convenient to have in your mp3 player.

Yeah it sucks. I think about half the album artwork got wiped, which is everything I didn't manually insert artwork for.

So I tinkered around with foobar and media monkey. Now I'm going to try musicbee. Who knew media player shopping would be so difficult...

I mean, you probably have a phone anyway.
I'm not criticizing the device, I just wonder, with the things phones can do nowadays, wouldn't it be cheaper to buy one device (a phone) that can do all this instead of a phone and an iPod touch?
I'm not really much into these things, so it's a serious question ;).

Don't forget winamp :)

You could easily set up a foobar install to download all the album art for you when you play those albums. Also, I don't really like storing information in database files, preferring to use file tags whenever possible. For example, in my library, ratings are written to the files so they appear even if I switch between different computers etc. (my library is on an external HD).

Album art should be stored as an image file, I think. I usually keep them named something like folder.jpg in my own library.

I get that part, I to to school with a bunch of rich kids, some with both an iPhone and an iPod touch (not joking). Me, I don't have a phone, because I would have to pay the bill, so no thanks, I'll stick to my reliable iPod Touch.

You don't have a phone. That makes sense.
Altough I would choose to pay bills instead of giving all that money to an iPod, but hey :D.
I love my phone :D.

Back ontopic now, I was just wondering.

VLC is what I use now-a-days. Has almost every format out of the box, and my library is so big it's hard to navigate with Rhythmbox anymore.

This may have already been mentioned, but can I use Foobar on my MacBook Pro?

I'm pretty sure Foobar is windows only.

VLC rocks, but it hasn't got a library has it?
Or am I missing something?