My iPod has new life now because I put in a FireWire card into my XP box and got XPlay form MediaFour. What a great piece of software. Though I love managing my iPod from my iBook, I rip all my MP3s from my XP box because: 1) CDex is a cool piece of software, 2) CDex uses the superior encoder LAME, and 3) I have more disk capacity on my XP box. XPlay just makes my iPod look like a regular drive on my PC, I just drag and drop music (or files) to it. That's it, easy as pie. Good piece of software.