I'm ecstatic that transcoding directly to iPod has finally received some love. My music collection is almost entirely flac so being able to transcode on the fly is THE feature I've been waiting years for.

Unfortunately the feature has one serious issue which makes it impractical for my use and that's the lack of multithreaded transcoding. I currently have a collection of over 5000 music files and transcoding them all is impractical. This is where gtkpod really shines, and is why I'll still have to use it to manage my iPod.

The problem is that, even though ffmpeg has multithreaded capabilities, encoding audio is a single threaded process. Years ago, when we were being teased about transcoding in Amarok 2 I brought up the issue (I'm dave in the comments section):
http://teom.org/blog/kde/a-summer-of-transcoding-for-amarok/

The solution I proposed is to spawn multiple concurrent transcoding process (like gtkpod). I hope the devs will consider this valuable addition as this would make Amarok a viable platform for managing large collections on an iOS device.