Hey, so there’s this awesome thing called Rockbox. It’s open-source firmware for your mp3 player. They support Apple, Archos, Cowon, iriver, Olympus, SanDisk, and Toshiba mp3 players. And they are AWESOME. I bought an iAudio x5 a while back and while I was really happy with the hardware, I wasn’t happy with the firmware. I switched over to Rockbox and it was a huuuge improvement- I got tetris! I had gapless playback! The music sounded better! The firmware was intuitive and customizable! I could pick any font, any color, any wallpaper, customize any number of elements! I didn’t have to deal with software, I could drag-and-drop straight to my mp3 player’s drive and organize folders and elements exactly as I wanted.

rockbox-themes.org has a ton of themes you can download and customize for your player. Here are some cool ones (please ignore the songs they chose):

A very animated theme based on Squaresoft’s very first Final Fantasy. White Mage is the battery indicator, he starts out casting magic and as the battery dies so does he. Black Belt is the Hard Drive indicator. Thief is the Hold Switch. Red Mage, Black Mage and Fighter dance to the music and Black Mage has a little surprise for the two guys in red if you fast forward or rewind.

This fairly simple and mostly text theme is based on the image and idea of a worn old favourite mix tape.

And if you are really, really, really, into the wii, you can carry it with you always:

It focuses on displaying track information in a neat, easy to read way integrated into a stylish WPS that focuses on the “Wiimote”. The + pad serves as the playback buttons, the A button has been transformed into a volume level indicator and the power button into a battery indicator. The indicator colors change from grey>red>yellow>green>blue>Wii blue as battery level increases. The simple shuffle and repeat buttons are displayed on the bottom left of the Wiimote. In tune with the Wii’s attitude the WPS uses a revolutionary curved progress bar.

You can switch out the picture pretty easily to anything you want.

Full support list:

Apple: 1st through 5.5th generation iPod, iPod Mini and 1st generation iPod Nano (not the Shuffle, 2nd/3rd gen Nano, Classic or Touch)
Archos: Jukebox 5000, 6000, Studio, Recorder, FM Recorder, Recorder V2 and Ondio
Cowon: iAudio X5, X5V, X5L, M5, M5L, M3 and M3L
iriver: H100, H300 and H10 series
Olympus: M:Robe 100
SanDisk: Sansa c200, e200 and e200R series (not the v2 models)
Toshiba: Gigabeat X and F series (not the S series)