http://www.play.com/Electronic ... uct.html?searchtype=genre

http://www.play.com/Electronic ... ct.html?searchtype=genre#

Without wanting to turn this in to a general loony noob thread, does anyone have any warnings or something e.g. will either of these things give me herpes ()? I'm just looking for something cheap and nasty really.

TBH I'd go for the most expensive one you can possibly afford, as the more expensive, the better it is (generally, of course), and cheap ones can be pretty naff.

Quote from J@tko :

TBH I'd go for the most expensive one you can possibly afford, as the more expensive, the better it is (generally, of course), and cheap ones can be pretty naff.

erm, no to that

stick with the nasty mp3 player duke and spend ~£30 on in-ear earphones and a good rechargeable battery is a must.

and...accept nothing less than 320kps or just stick with wav, is best imo

Before I got my iPod, I used to have one of these:

http://www.microdirect.co.uk/( ... -MP3-Player--with-FM.aspx

Excellent little device.

Utterly dirt cheap, but surprisingly good sound quality and also has an FM radio built in. 4GB equates to over 500 songs encoded so they're about 7MB each. With higher compression you can fit twice that on there, although the sound quality will suffer. It's recognised as just a USB flash drive by your PC and so it'll store any filetype you like, not just music, and that also means it's just a simple drag and drop interface to put songs on there.

I suspect the quality will be pretty similar across the board with cheap ones - there's only so many different types of decoding chips you can buy for pennies. The old one I had was similar to the one Crashgate3 linked to, till I got my iPod nano. Can't grumble about it, but I wasn't exactly using top notch headphones with it to notice any real quality difference. Some of them can do things more expensive ones like iPod's don't even think of - voice recording, FM radio, simple folder organisation, 30+ hour battery life from a good rechargable, to name a few bits.

Yes, I forgot about battery life too. Because they're basically just a flash drive with a headphone jack it'll get well over 24 hours of play off a single AAA battery.

This is the updated version of mine. Got it... god, about 4 years ago and it's still going strong. I wanted one that I didn't need batteries for and it was ideal.
The only downside it has is that you can't use it while it's plugged in. Thankfully it charges in no time.

I prefer this: http://www.creative.com/products/mp3/zenstone/

Hello... word of advice...

DONT GET THE ITRONICS. It takes about a month to brake them and one short walk under a raincloud it enough to send them to mp3 heaven. I have had a few different mp3 players, I get bored of them and get a new one from time to time. In my experience the iPod's have been over rated, you get a nice player but not nice enough for the money. The only mp3 player I regret changing was the creative zen, it was 8 gig which was more than big enough, I must of dropped it more than 100 times and it wasn't going to die. Another thing is the headphone jack sometimes works loose on them when you carry them in your pocket, this did not happen with the creative zen. The docking station (an optional extra) is amazingly good, very loud, does not distort and come with all cables required aswell as an infa-red remote. I was able to pack up my hifi for the zen.

Edit: I don't think a docking station is available for the zen stone, however, this unit is much smaller than that of its predecessor. I think the earlier model was a zen touch.

The Sandisk Sansa e200 series is great, I have an 4 GB one, but it can take a microSD card so it's expandable storage. Battery life is great too.

ive had two cheapo ones, they didnt last more than a few months. just bad build quality and software imo.

Goodmans GMP315. Need I say more? Well it cost me a fiver from Halfords, has 256mb of memory and well, it still works awesome! It has a sound recorder, a screen and everything! The GMP317 is what they sell IIRC now, and that is even better!