iPod Classic Upgrade
After much research, I think I need:- - An iPod Classic 160Gb 7th Generation (ie the current 160 Classic).

- Sourced from the USA or at least outside the EU to avoid the hard coded EU volume cap.

- Upgraded with a high capacity battery for added life

- Upgraded with a Toshiba MK2431GAH 240Gb hard disk
This should be good for 32K tracks. Unfortunately the shuffle function uses a signed int so is limited to 2^15. Provided you keep down the metadata on each track it will handle >32k tracks in total but won't shuffle all which means breaking it down into multiple playlists of < 32k. The metadata problem is that itunes.db needs to fit in the available 64Mb of RAM. Apparently, gnupod and possibly other utilities can be used to strip the metdata down to essentials and so squeeze the database. I routinely clean unused tags from my MP3s and remove cover images anyway so may not have a problem. There is actually a 320Gb disk coming on line that would fit, but these firmware limits mean it's not really worth trying.

I've seen a few other people asking about Super high capacity PMPs (portable music players) but it doesn't look like anyone has a good solution. The need is still out there but nobody wants to serve it, and especially not Apple.

Apparently my early iPod 160 Classic uses an incompatible twin platter hard disk with an incompatible disk interface. It also won't run the latest Apple Firmware. So rather than being dead it's simply obsolete.

Meanwhile the iPod Touch battery has died and it's a 3g Touch so wont run iOS 6 or 7. So frankly the only thing it's good for is as a permanently plugged in winamp remote!