A better iPod Classic replacement?

Those who know me, I have amassed a huge collection of music over the past decade and a half. So much, in that I don’t have enough CD towers to store them all. I have also ripped the CDs in MP3 (a bare minimum of 256kbps CBR, though my standard is now 320kbps), as well as many of my favorites in FLAC and ALAC.

Why FLAC and ALAC? I chose FLAC since it is a lossless and open format, in which I can treat each FLAC file as an archive-worthy copy that so happens to contain ReplayGain data. Not to mention, it’s perfect for listening to music in my living room through my Squeezebox or one of my Sennheiser headphones (HD570 and HD580). Now, it may seem redundant to have FLAC and ALAC copies floating around, but it’s necessary because Apple decided to go with ALAC as their sole lossless format for iTunes and their iPods.

All said, in order to carry around a good selection of music and podcasts (including every Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! show made available as a podcast, Car Talk, This American Life), I need something has a storage capacity of at least 120GB. My current 160GB iPod Classic does the deed fairly well… except for the fact that I can’t play FLAC files on it (I know about RockBox, but my iPod Classic is not supported). I’m also at the point where I would like to carry around more podcasts and more albums in a lossless format, preferably in FLAC format.

So, I’ve been looking around for a better alternative and one that has a 250GB (or larger) hard drive. Unfortunately, it is slim pickin’s and not many do a good job of handling dynamic or on-the-go playlists. I know there are flash memory based players out there that can take 32GB Micro-SDHC cards and support FLAC, but that would require a lot of card swapping and would lead to long load times and playlist management nightmare. I’m kind of dealing with that right now with two 32GB SDHC cards for my S5, but instead of swapping out cards (as the head unit has two SD/SDHC slots), I have to switch between sources and playlists cannot span across slots.

I have also considered giving up on using a lossless format for portable use, but that’s a compromise that I’m not willing to make right now. I would really like to make good use of my audio setup in my S5 and “dumbing” down to 256kbps MP3 just doesn’t feel quite right.

I know there isn’t a huge market for hard drive based portable media players, particularly ones that support FLAC and Ogg Vorbis. Everything is moving towards flash memory (internal or with swappable memory cards), due to form factor, weight and battery life. Unfortunately, that has the side effect of relatively lower capacity, or moderately large capacity at much higher prices (iPod Touch, anyone?).

Until a better iPod Classic or similar device arrives, I’ll have to slog around with my iPod Classic and its waning battery.