I’m taking advantage of the fact that that the iPod is really a 40GB hard drive connected via USB 2.0 to play back music using Windows Media Player 9.  In doing this, I get full fidelity in WMP including things like album art, ratings, frequently played tracks, automatic playlist generation, etc.

To make it work, I deleted all of the entries from my existing media library and then imported all of the music that is sitting on the iPod.  However, note that it’s necessary to remove the Hidden bits from \iPod_Control\Music\F00-F49 folders, as Windows Media Player refuses to search hidden directories.

I now have a notebook hard drive that is free from music – thereby returning over 15GB of space to me! – yet still have the exact same experience as I had before in Windows Media Player.  Nice.  The only thing I would like now is for synchronization between ratings and play counts on the iPod with Windows Media Player.  That would be cool.