My faithful Creative Zen Touch needs upgrading, and an 80 gb iPod looks like it might be the current sweet spot.

From what I have discovered, it looks like if I install rockbox, I can play flac files on an iPod.

If I'm right, looks like I need to choose between flac and apple lossless. Ideally, I only want to rip my CDs once. Down the track, I may well start using a squeezebox or something similar in my home system.

Are there any sq advantages of one type over the other? What about storage space?

i haven't kept up with rockbox lately, but did they ever actually get it working on the 80gig ipods? i know for the longest time they couldn't get it working with the 5.5 80gig and i wonder if they have it working with the classic's at all.

getting rockbox made for 3G iPods to work made me want to vomit, so I steered clear of it

Why not use dBPoweramp and CDRipper and convert your CD's to ALAC. It's just as easy, and a lot friendlier than installing a new operating system on an iPod. They are both lossless.

and since you appear to have stuff in flac already dbpoweramp can convert from flac to alac.

I do that every day. I have 500 MB of .flac on an external, and it takes 11 seconds to convert a CD over to ALAC for my iMod.