iTunes 3 looks to be the closest media player to the empegs player. Play counts, shuffle based off that, and dynamic volume compression. It adds a raitings sytem, and allows creation of playlists based off a ton of parameters. IE Create a 650 meg playlist of 80's songs I have never listened to, or create a 300 meg playlist of all my 5 star songs, randomly.

5gb iPod is $299
10gb is $399 - with a remote, solid state control wheel, carying case and firewire door. Plus 10% thinner now.
20gb is $499 - same accessories as above

iTunes 3 integration with play counts. And many other interface changes, including iCal support.

*edit* - Windows support for iPod with Musicmatch, same price. Late August availability.

And yes, I'm blue. I was playing with the colors for some ideas, and can't get it back right now. Don't ask, I'll be back to the standard moderator color soon.

I haven't looked at iTunes 3 yet (didn't even know it was out), but I have some serious problems with previous versions of iTunes. The first one is that it wants to remember every track and playlist that goes through it. So if I wanna play something off of a web site, it remembers it, even if it's dynamically generated and I can never play it again. This pisses me off to no end. Many of my other problems are related to that, like the fact that I have to import stuff into iTunes to play it. I just want to play a track. Since I have multiple computers, I organize my tracks on the shared filesystems. But iTunes doesn't care. It would, in fact, prefer it if they were just all lumped together in one directory. But it's the only Mac OS X player I can find that will support URL playlists.

Maybe 3 will be better....

Edit: iTunes 3 isn't out yet! Are you trying to confuse me?

Edit again: Okay, so it is. But I swear it wasn't there before.

Snazzy new color, Drakino. I like

Mmmmm - Blue! Nice!