I'm planning to get the 5th gen big ipod when it comes out and was wondering which lossless formats work with it? If nobody knows about the 5th gen, what works with todays ipod will suffice. Will FLAC work with ipod?

Apple lossless only.

OK thanks

Does anyone here use lossless on these players ? logic tells me it would destroy the hard drive and battery quicker, really the entire unit will likely have a shorter life.

To the OP, the current color iPods are still fourth generation iPods. Apple has yet to release a full new generation iPod other than the nano and shuffle.

To shadowking. I tried Apple lossles on my fourth generation 40GB (black and white) iPod. The battery lasted a surprising 8 hours, for wav my battery would last 4 hours. The only problem is that a 4 minute song will take up around 22MB so I could only fit about 200 songs on my iPod before it would fill up instead of the standard 7000 mp3's at the --alt-preset standard or 10000 songs at the 128kbps AAC file format.

It will cause the battery to drain faster, thus, causing the user to charge their battery more and decreasing the amount of charge cycles the iPod has left. Does this mean anything to the common user, not really. In using the lossless format, the iPod battery may last 2.5 years instead of it lasting 3 years as with the mp3 format. As for the hard drive being destroyed, it won't really affect the hard drive that much. If the iPods hard drive were to be affected by putting larger files on it then quite a bit of notebook hard drive would be affected by installing Windows on them.

22MB x 200 = 4400MB / 4.3GB (not 40GB)

I think you can play FLAC using ipodlinux

Josh