Got the creative zen touch 20gb which is good, has a genuine 15hr plus battery life too.

The interface is alright providing your songs have been labeled properly. at a minimum you need all the albums labeled, and having artists and tracks help a great deal.

Plugs straight into media player as well.

thats the one my daughter has :wink: but it's discontinued now :(

bet you could find one on ebay though :wink:

The sony software has been universally panned as a big pile of fetid dingo's kidneys that ruins an otherwise good player. My preference is for an iAudio X5. Traditional windows like file structure, rather than sorting by mp3 tags and it can be used as a USB host so you can transfer your digital pictures to it straight from the camera if you sun out of storage on the camera's card. And it will play pretty much any format, even FLAC! Brilliant.

Not that it should ever cause a problem for personal use, but i tunes doesn't let you copy music onto, say another computer, you basically 'check out' the song from your computer to avoid illegal distribution

unless anyone knows different, makes thing a bit of a pain in the ****, especially if you use a couple of computers

I dunno, I feel like I'm in the stone age with my CD walkman.
Not tooo sure about all this 21st century everything you own in one basket stuff.

http://www.creative.com/products/pro...&product=10274

Can agree with this one. After much deliberation i bought it for my mrs for Christmas. Better than the Ipod as in many ways and cheaper.

The labeling issue can be said for virtually all player. Garbage in, garbage out applies as usual

i had one of those, infact i had 3 of those, as they all were replaced under warranty. ive given up on em now.

I'm torn between getting a humungous one and just dumping everything onto it, or getting a small one and using it basically like a big walkman... First the Great Ripping will take place, to get some idea of volume. But before I can do that, I'll need to sort out my CDs. And before i can do that, I've had to tidy up the rest of the room so I can reach them.

This may take some time :)

I think the rights managment on itunes becomes an issue if you have replaced your computer.

Hmm. So, having ripped the first 1/18th of my albums, looks like even a 60gb one won't be big enough. So, there's a compromise to be made there as to what I put on it obviously. The question now is how far I should take that- get a 60gb and carry maybe 3/4 of all my music (if even that)? Of which much will be stuff I'll likely never listen to. Or drop it down to a 20 or 30 and just carry highlights- still be thousands of tracks, though. Or, get a wee tiny one and just carry bits.

I've a feeling it'd be just as annoying to have to filter content to decide what rates a place on the player and what doesn't, whether I have to choose 20, 30 or 60gb worth. And tbh I don't anticipate suddenly having a burning desire to listen to Metal Christmas (featuring Paul DiAnno from Iron Maiden) or that Alkaline Trio album that I can't remember any of the songs off, even when I've literally just listened to it 5 minutes ago.

Don't fancy iTunes much, none of the "features" seem to be anything I'd use, and the drawbacks are all things that'd annoy me. So is it true that you can only use a new-gen iPod with it? You can't update it using, say, Windows Media Player's sync function, or just copy items onto it like a regular device? If so, that's that binned. I get scorned for this, but I'm pretty keen on the WMP10 interface, I seem to be compatible with it.

I've heard many good things about iRiver players, and they're extremely cheap... Seems to be that or some flavour of Zen. My stingy side may be about to strike.

Thanks for all the suggestions folks- I asked this same question on a mailing list I'm on, and now it's deteriorated into Format Wars. 20 audiophiles screaming at each other because the difference between 256Kbps MP3 and blah blah blah should be painfully obvious, and you'd have to be deaf to miss it :roll: