If you want capacity and do not use it for jogging or other activities that would make a HDD skip, I would go with the Dard Drive players (e.g. The IPOD).

If skipping could be a problem, or you want a cheaper player I would reccommend the Nex II. I bought one for my wife for Xmas and she just loves it. A very simple machine, but I like that it takes regular MP3's no anti copying stuff here. Also it uses Compact Flash. CF offers the largest Solid State card capacities for the least $$. For example I bought her 2 256MB cards for $125. I would look on Ebay for good prices, we paid about $100 without memory.

Thanks,keep them coming,your inputs are helpful. I know I am going to get the Etys earphones(the cheaper model),and now just figuring out which MP3 player to get.

Thank you for advice.

I use a Sony MiniDisk player. It plays all kind of formats, incl MP3 and didn't cost me an arm and a leg (about $130 IIRC). Easy to record music to and one disk can store several hours of music (depending on format and bit rate). When I travel I usually take a couple of disks with me and am set for the entire trip.

May or may not help depending on where you live, but if you are near a The Wiz store and they are having their 15 to 30% off everything in the store sale liek the one down the street is (looks more like going out of business sale), they had the Ipods at a 15% discount today. Not sure if that was the demos or not, never know with them, but they are hardly ever discounted, so if you have a Wiz near you....

I don't know about this particular store but usually the discounted iPods being sold are the old 5GB and 10GB models which have the mechanical scroll wheel and do not have the wired remote control. Nothing wrong with these models except that they're not the latest.