Highest capacity, audio amp quality player

[foe]

I'm looking to buy a replacement for my gigabeat f60 which has lost audio in one channel (it looks to be fixable by resolder of the joint on the connector), and gave me an electric shock in my ears (sennheiser hd212pro). So I'm thinking of just using it as a portable hard-drive and maybe reading text off it, (if I can't fix it). I have about 175 gb of FLAC and a ridiculous amount of mp3s. The f60 has been good to me apart from crashing and bugs , I bought it for 175 (australian dollars) second-hand if I recall correctly.

All I care about is highest capacity, best build quality, (and powerful enough to decode highest compression, high bit/sample -rate FLAC), the gigabeats seem to be rare now, are there any new players planned for rockbox support that I should wait for or should I succumb to the Apple monopoly?

[soap]

FWIW FLAC is one of the easiest formats to decode.  Takes a lot of hard drive spin-ups due to its size, but very little CPU.
I, personally, was never impressed with the build quality of the Gigabeat F series, and prefer my iPod Video.  Parts (including headphone jacks/daughterboards are easy to find for iPods as well. 

[TexasRockbox]

I'm partial to the the iPod video as well.  Easy to service, plentiful easy-to-obtain parts, and if one really wants to ($$$), can incorporate a 240GB Toshiba drive (requires special Rockbox build).

[foe]

Thanks for the recommendations. I would buy one of the 120gb ones if I heard from a rockbox dev that they're working on it, I'll beta/alpha test

[TexasRockbox]

I don't think anyone is working much on a 120GB iPod Classic build.  There is a topic in the new build forums but it really hasn't progressed too far.  They're still working on the encryption part.

[evilnick]

If you want a player that works right now then get one that is listed as supported on the front page of rockbox.org

I've heard some vague rumours of progress on the iPod Classic port, but it may take months before that's in a day-to-day usable state.

[pondlife]

I've heard some vague rumours of progress on the iPod Classic port, but it may take months before that's in a day-to-day usable state.

..or it may never ever run Rockbox!

pondlife