iPOD How many cds does it really Hold ?any Tips??

Apple Lossless and Sure E3c's for me. Make sure and try the different earpieces that come with the Sures. I didn't like the rubber tips, but the foam work great.
Steve

AAC files are actually smaller than MP 3 files, and are better quality. If you digitize your CD's using this compression method you should theoretically (depending on the length of songs you are digitizing) be able to store 10,000 songs on a 40 gig iPod. Apple lossless encoding is a different thing entirely, and is bit for bit an exact copy of your CD,

WAV files are useless and do not have a place in this application. there is no advantage, sound quality wise, of wavs over losslessly compressed files. if you decide that you want no loss in quality, just use lossless compression to save some space and give yourself a lot more room for more music!

I only have a measly 20 GB iPod, but it holds about 3700 songs @ 192kHz AAC/MP3, and for listening to earbuds is fine for me.

I also use mine a lot on planes, and I find the Sony MDR-NC11 active noise canceling earbuds to be great for planes! They cut out the drone of the engines, leaving a much quieter background, so I can listen to music at much lower volumes…saving my batteries for the return trip, and these are small enough to fit into the front pocket of my iPods padded case.

The first point is that the 40GB is reduced to around 37GB in terms of available space-the difference is due to utilising the software etc to make the thing run.

My 40GB iPod is full and it holds 9163 songs which is around 28 days of continious music using AAC.