I have had great success with the Iriver brand, I have one of their IFP 795 players, which is good. Their new players are Umass storage capable which is nice. Most good players are Umass storage supported. Otherwise you will be stuck with, closed drivers and the like. My player is old but supports a standard AA battery, and has direct encoding. It also comes with an FM tuner, which is nice if you get want to listen to FM instead of your music collection. Gnu_Raiz