Portable digital audio, looking for help

I need a way to get all my songs in my car. I'm sick of bringing CD along for the ride. So, I figure a portable hard disk player is for me. The only thing is that I can't seem to find any that play anything other than MP3s and WMA files. The Ipod plays WAVs, but I could only fit about 40 albums on a 30 gig Ipod that way. The bottom line is that I don't want to mess with MP3s and WMAs. Both sound like total shit. Is there anything out there with the versitility of Winamp? I'd love to be able to play SHNs or FLACs or some other lossless compression. Heck, I'd love to be able to play .SFCs, .GYMs, .PSFs, and all those other wonderful game formats.

Do Ipods or Nomads or Archos Jukeboxes offer any kind of downloadable plugins for support of other formats? It just seems awfully short sighted to me for all of these expensive players to only offer 1 or 2 playback formats, especially when the 2 formats they offer are both awful, and a free program like Winamp offers playback of so much more.

Any ideas?

Laptop + WinAmp + Passenger seat? :p

The iPod plays AAC files too. Much better than MP3.

As for playing "game" formats... I'm not even gonna go there.

iPod iPod iPod!!! I don't know if will work for all those formats but it's still the best option I know.

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Originally Posted by Kenshin

The iPod plays AAC files too. Much better than MP3.

As for playing "game" formats... I'm not even gonna go there.

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Hmmmm... I will have to download a Windows AAC player and check this format out. I've never heard of it. Is it lossless?

If you only want to listen to tunes in your car, you could look into having a hdd installed in your car, but I think only mp3 is supported for those, if not though, you could easily have more than 120GB of storage.... maybe...

Anybody know about the volume issues with the Ipod? I've heard about a few people complaining about them being too quiet. Also, does anybody know if there is any normalizing feature to bring all of the songs to the same level, and if it exists can it be turned off?

How will the iPod be hooked up to your car? Does your head unit have A/V inputs, or are you using a tape attachment, or what?

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Originally Posted by Tones

How will the iPod be hooked up to your car? Does your head unit have A/V inputs, or are you using a tape attachment, or what?

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I'm going to just "wing it" and go after my head unit with a screwdriver, soldering iron, and RCA cables. :D I figure there has to be something in there that is obviously where it gets it's audio input.....

AAARRRRGH! I was just looking into this AAC thing and it was looking quite good. Then I find out you can only put AAC files on an iPod if you have a Mac. Us PC guys only get MP3. WTF!!! :mad:

edit: OK, you can use AAC files from windows, but not in any officially suported way...

iTunes is being developed for Windows as we speak. Since AAC is Apple's format of choice now, it'll be all spiffy.

If you don't want a wired solution to hookup to your car stereo, here's a wonderful soltuion:

http://www.griffintechnology.com/products/itrip/