Portable MP3 Player

Any recommendations?

My fitness instructor (meathead - but good bloke) has asked me to find one for him to buy. He wants to fit roughly 100 songs on the memory and wants to spend around $500.

There are some cool ones out there, apple has one with a 20GB memory and claims it holds 4000 songs, though I'm sure if you reduced the kbps you could fit way more, but it costs $845

Any recommendations would be good, or even if someone is willing to sell one second hand.

Thanks

Have a look at:
www.mstation.com.au
www.mp3direct.com.au
www.minidisc.com.au

I don't think you can beat the capacity of a hard drive player but yes they are fairly expensive. If you're looking at something CD based then there I think IRiver is the only way to go. I've heard very good things about the Panasonic and Sony units though.

Basically you get a shitload of capacity for what is the highest inital cost in Hard drive players. You pay a little in size but given the capacity it's a pretty good trade off. Next you have CD units that can vary in price and features from quite cheap ($200) to fairly expensive ($500) - capacity is very cheap. There's the obvious size problem of CD media but the players are usually very thin. Flash players obviously have very expensive media but are small, light and have long playing times relative to their power requirements. Some come with storage, some without and amounts vary. Price can vary from cheap say "50 to easily over a grand when you factor in extra flash cards.

Something to consider is a remote w/ LCD which comes in handy. Also might wish to consider built battery charging.

I personally want to get one of the newish IRiver flash based units but they go for around $700 for the 512 meg version :/ They are very sexy though.

Anyway those shops above should give you more than enough ideas.

Of course there are always MD's as well..

Only thing with MD's is that you wont get many songs on a disc but the disc's are bloody cheap :D

Yep and don't forget you can use hdd/flash based products for file transfers as well. Same goes for CD's as well but that's umm.. fairly limited.

Own both Nomad 6Gb and now have the Nomad 3 20gb. Both are excellent.

Imo they are the best value for money then the memory types of players.
More storage, use them to transfer files, and its Creative so cant argue
about sound quality. :)

I had the Rio player and while small and nice, very limited even with expansion ram cards.

Also with the new players coming out they have built in FM transeiver so you can tune your car radio into the players freq and listen.

mini disks are great and you can fit heaps of songs with MDLP (long play)

you can fit 4 cd's worth, although sony sux and im sending my MD of yet again to get it fixed xoz the bloody things is crap and keeps breaking..

iPod

http://www.apple.com.au/ipod

Just get any portable discman that can play mp3's
Sony has one
Im sure Panasonic has one too

Yep they do.. the Panasonics are supposedly the better choice too. They cost a packet though.. if I was going CD I'd just get an IMP model iRiver though I would like most people feel better buying a huge brand name like Panasonic or Sony.

i have one sell it to you for 200 dollars,

LG bought it a year ago for 500

has two 16mb cards so you will need to buy more.

barely used

only problem is software isnt NT compatible. You will need to find some elsewhere.