I bet you've probably been asked this a million times, but I'm going to ask it again.

What are the odds that superior formats like MPC or Monkey's Audio might receive portable support? I read a rumor on this forum that a chinese flash player had unofficial support for MPC, and am speculating that when we see pocket pc's with built in harddrives (imagine windows ce-or linux- sitting atop a 20gb hd in a handheld! w/headphone out!) maybe it would come indirectly through a linux port.

Wait!

I just saw a pig fly! Ooops, my mistake-just a weather balloon!

My personal gut feeling is slim to none and slim uses flac for his files.

All you need is a portable device that can run Win32 applications...a small PDA, for example. I'm not saying a product like this exists but it's economically feasible.

I still don't understand why somebody hasn't released a portable that allows you to upload third-party plug-ins to the device. Make it like a WinAMP player but a piece of self-contained hardware.

It would require much different thinking on the software designer's part to work plugins into a music player. To make it at all reasonable for developers and manufacturers, you'd need some soft of primitive debugging support (debugger hooks, a serial link, or a simulator), a compiler toolchain, etc. Stuff like that requires significant engineering effort to get right.

Portable music players generally differ from PDAs in only a few respects:

• Good headphone output (duh). But I hear some PDAs have very good analog circuitry in this regard.
• Very large storage space
• Much smaller screen space, for cost and battery life
• Limited user input (ie no touchpads) - for cost and battery life
• A design emphasis on ASICs for music decoding, rather than general purpose CPUs, to improve battery life, design cost and manufacturing cost
• Closed development APIs

It's the last two points which are holding up plugin development. IMHO a smaller empeg would be ideal, although using an open-source firmware would cause major issues with playing back protected formats like AAC and WMA.

MP3 players have essentially become commodity items... it seems like there are enough arguments to justify a good open source OS for music players. Like this one. The trick is using a player with enough space firmware space to make it worthwhile... and has either open source firmware or reverse engineered hardware. Either of those options seems pretty improbable.

[DAYDREAM]
Ahh, to be able to run foobar2000 on a PDA
[/DAYDREAM]