[conspire] MP3 players

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Bill Moseley (moseley at hank.org):

> I'm looking for a small MP3 player for use by my son.  Before I set
> off shopping I'm wondering if anyone has suggestions on good units.
> 
> I'm looking in the < $100 range (really less than that because of the
> likely chance of it being lost, dropped, stepped on...).
> 
> I assume most of the smaller players just look like USB drives and I
> can mount and copy directly to it.
> 
> Doesn't seem like any of the inexpensive players support Ogg Vorbis.

They do[1], after you load Rockbox onto them:  http://www.rockbox.org/
(Clever how I added Linux relevance to this thread, eh?  ;->  )

I don't have a lot of experience with choosing among hardware
implementations, but the Rockbox pages will give you additional starting
points for shopping, I'd guess.  And you might want to look to the used
market, to save money.

[1] Except for Archos models, which remain limited to MP3 and WAV.  On
the other hand, Rocbox _does_ add Ogg support to supported models of
iRiver, iPod, and Audio X5 hardware.