a friend of mine stood by this for a long time, he got a zune and has looked back fondly on those times, but he enjoys his zune too much I suppose.

my vote goes for the cowon d2.
you can get a 8 gig model for around 150 bucks off amazon and it has an sd slot supporting sdhc so you could throw another 32 gigs of music in there as well.
it also supports flac and vorbis and has a full touch screen and video player too. subtitles are actually very readable on the screen.
To be honest the touchscreen part is more of a hassle then it's worth but the features and the 50 hrs of battery life and excellent sound quality more then make up for this shortcoming. In additon it has a really powerful amp for a portable player that can easily drive the higher end headphones that the ipod can't come close to handling.

After replying I checked out the creative website - alas these AAA battery operated players are not available. just some refurbished ones. All new ones seem to be using these LION batteries, mainly built-in. I love being able to swap batteries on the fly and not having an expensive battery go bad.

Bought one of these faceles MP3 players about 4 months ago. Bloody Brilliant! http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/8GB-TOUCH-SCREEN-2-8-LCD-MP3-MP4-FM-RADIO-VIDEO-PLAYER_W0QQitemZ320331775795QQcmdZViewItemQQptZUK_AudioTVElectronics_PortableAudio_MP3Players?hash=item320331775795&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14&_trkparms=72%3A1300%7C66%3A2%7C65%3A12%7C39%3A1%7C240%3A1318
Forget the branded stuff. £30 including postage and it plays all WMA's MP3's, AVI's, Radio with presets, touch screen AND has a 2gb expansion miniSD slot. AND not one single bloody bit of that garbage apple DRM!
Good quality too.
If you want the best electronics don't go to a shop, go direct to where they make them!

I'm using PSP for pretty much all my portable multimedia needs - it's no miracle, but it can do the job, and pretty well I might add. And with 4 GB memory, I'm able to kill so much time with that little thingie (which is not exactly 'little', but, in fact, I like it being farely big because of big/small screen :D )

80% of their library is drm-free and in another month or two it will all be drm-free

yes, but will they offer non-drm versions of songs you already bought? I didn't think so.

Its called "burning a CD".

I am sorry, but I don't want to burn 50 plus discs for music i already have and don't intend to ever use the CDs again.

Well, there is a way to get rid of the DRM (mumblemumbleqtfairusemumblemumble)

You could simply burn an image, then rip that. But that's just the technical argument, personally I detest everything Apple.

I think he meant that he doesn't want to waste 50 discs just for re-ripping. Besides, the quality doesn't exactly improve with reencoding either.
Edit, sorry missread that post (kinda overlooked the word "image")... are there any working virtual CD-recorders around?

http://infrarecorder.org/
'Burn' to ISO then rip it?
There's still a quality drop, but from what I've read elsewhere, people are reporting Apple is giving them a chance to upgrade DRM to nonDRM, and even get it at a higher bitrate.
There is a cost involved of course, apparently up to $0.10US per song.
source: Ars and Slashdot user forums... Not exactly official, so don't take my post as such.

The problem is that you need an emulated CD burner, not just any software that can write ISOs, as you have to "burn" through iTunes and nothing else.