Ok, so I'm not in the market for one of the really nice hard drive based players quite yet, because of the price

I am pretty particular, but I can't really afford to be, so I'm looking for a way to
play mp3s in my car, which I'll sadly have to use a tape adapter to do.

My chiefest concern is the price, not really wanting to go over 60 bucks right now..

2nd concern, is the amount of time I have to wait, particularly boot-up time.. I have an old nomad jukebox which is basically unusable as far as I'm concerned because it takes AGES to boot and freezes up often enough I need to reset it and wait again for the boot process. Seek time and I guess caching would also fall into this.. I'm an impatient guy It can be a few seconds, just nothing that would really annoy you while trying to use.

Good file navi and tag support would be nice (looks like most only support up to id3v2.3 whereas a good many of my files are 2.4.. But not a big issue since I
just want cheap..

Flash players don't have enough space and seem wasteful for the money they cost, I guess the advantages being really small sizes and solid state..

I think my best option is a cd based player. I heard the irivers are nice but I only
hear the 550 being talked about most places and thats way too expensive.. I'd put that kind of cash towards a hard drive player..

So, what do you guys think is the cheapest but most competent player in my price range? that won't piss me off with boot/seek times?

Thanks for the assistance, I know many people ask the "which is best" question a lot.. there's a lot of hardware out there though And most discussions are over the hard drive models...

-jk

It will be hard to find a good player for $60.
Perhaps you could go for a 2nd hand iRiver IMP-150/250/350.
Avoid cheapass brands like they are being sold here in Europe at the Aldi/Lidl discount shops: very poor sound quality, trouble with vbr-playback....

If you're not wanting to go above $60 for the time being (which I can certainly appreciate), you're pretty much limited to CD-based MP3 players. Flash players can be had for $60, but they will only hold an hour or two of music at 128kbps. I'm not sure where you are from, but I know that here in the US, retailers like Best Buy, Wal-Mart, and Target have MP3-CDP's for around $60. Sure, they're no iRivers, but they do the job on a budget.

OT: ALDI actually sells MP3 players? That's news to me. Here, they only sell horrifyingly low-quality generic food!

I've a Panasonic SL-CT700 and i'm really happy: it's cheap (it's about $80, i know you've said $60, but... it's very hard if you want a really good player), i burn 700Mb of mp3 on a cd-rw and play them! battery life is very long, i can't hear differences in audio quality from winamp when i hear with my HQ Sennheiser headphones... It reads cbr and vbr mp3s and anti shock is one minute and a half... It supports id3v1 tags and you can listen to normal cds without ripping them... I know ipod is really cool, but why should i spend a LOT of money for a mp3 player with problems in cbr at 320Kbps?!?!

Bye!