Adding ram seems quite complex, and it seems like there's a simpler solution. I know i've seen flash ram drives with an IDE interface, and I'm fairly sure i've heard of SDRAM drives with ide interfaces. Seeing as laptop drives now come in sizes up to 60GB and won't stop there, a very reasonable mp3 collection could be assembled on one drive leaving the other one to use as very low latency scratch space for your programming projects.

Flash would be a bad solution, as its life cycle is limited, but SDRAM would work well. It would of course only be useful for software that you wrote yourself, but then again no one thinks that extra ram would help with the player software...

Why don't we just hook up one of those keychain things to the USB port? <GRIN> (it's a joke. read the FAQ)