RESTORE to free up fragmented iPod disc space? There must be a better way!

I've owned iPods since day one and yet I continue to (barely) tolerate an annoying circumstance, as follows: manually deleting songs and videos (mind you, I'm not referring to playlists) will free up some space on [put your iPod iteration here] but NEVER results in freeing up space equal to the size of the songs or videos deleted. As a result, the remaining "fragmented" space builds up over time and creates a serious loss of available "free" space — unless one performs a Restore and starts loading from scratch. Happily, Restore will double — or triple! — the amount of available (re: writable) space on iPods — but serious cost in personal time and trouble
For those of us with high capacity iPods — I can hear you yelling, "Me! Me!" — why, alas, does Restore continue to be the only way for us to manually rebuild the iPod library (thereby resulting in much more writable (rer: available) disk space)?
There must be an easier way? Countless searches of Apple Discussions produces nothing more than endless refrains of "Restore, Restore, Restore!"
Me, I'm tired of manually restoring 25 GBs of songs/videos in order to free up that extra 50 percent of writable space.
How about you?
5G 30GB ipod Mac OS X (10.4.4)

Welcome to Apple Discussions.
Me, I'm tired of manually restoring 25 GBs of songs/videos in order to free up that extra 50 percent of writable space.
Buy a larger-capacity iPod, then.
If you really feel like Apple will hear you with your complaints, then do it here. Unless you have something that I can help you with, then please ask.
rjl

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