Hi guys.. I was thinking of buying this mp3 player because it's cheap.. about $50 pretty much everywhere. I would consider the iRiver equivalent model if i could find one locally, but can't. Anyway, i was just curious as to anybody's impressions of this model for mp3 playback. I'm looking to play EAC secure mode ripped audio to the APS standard with LAME 3.90.3 of course (the uber 3.0 spec).. Other players i've used seem to choke on the higher bitrate portions of the songs, screwing up the pitch, speed, even volume.. just destroying the sound.

As near as i can tell, it seems that the only drawback of this player is that it cannot fast forward a playing file.. So you have to skip to next, previous, or replay entire song.. No skipping 15 seconds into a playing song apparently. I'm probably going to be buying it in 2 days.. Just wanted thoughts by anyone if they had used it.

I had excellent luck with a much older Panasonic mp3 CD portable (MP35?) and LAME encoded VBR files until it was stolen. It had the exact same seeking limitation so I'd guess the 430 is probably using a similar chip. The only issue with that player was the resume feature restarted normal CD's from the beginning of the song, and ID3 support was iffy.

Hopefully a local retailer will allow you to demo the unit with a burned CD before you buy it. If you remember which tracks you've had problems with, try some of those.