<rant>

1. Size and storage. Make it a little bigger, maybe thinner but longer, than an Ipod mini. Give it a CF slot on the side. For convinience, have the button that pops the CF card out be a small hole for a ball-point pen.
2. Playback. MP3, Ogg, WMA, FLAC--gapless! It's not like the info isn't there, and flash should surely be easier to do it with than a HDD. I could see not being gapless across formats (a gap going from Ogg files to MP3 files, FI). But among the same file type with the same encoder, why is this not a standard feature?
3. Controls. A dpad or 4-direction hat switch with buttons on the four sides, volume below those. Simple, easy to use, hand-agnostic. LED above the controls.
4. Playlists and directories. Why not be a UMS device, and be able to use .m3u playlists made on the device (relative paths would already exist, and it should be simple for software to make them that way in a transfer)? Or simply browse folders. Creative just came out with one (N200), and from what I read, it ignores anything past the first directory down, and only shows up as a drive in Win2k/XP.
5. Easy to replace battery. Like the CF card, a pen-hole for popping it out. You could carry a gumstick replacement with you.

Now, why can't they get those features in a small DAP, have good sound quality and decent battery life (15 hours or so, LI)? iRiver and Creative come close in their own ways, but if a company can release a new player every 6 months to a year, why not put several more months into it and make the best possible player? While I can see not supporting various formats (though FLAC should be), I'm somewhat suprised Apple doesn't do this with the HDD players. If they did, I'd have some hope for the flash players they should have in the next year.

</rant>

OTOH, is there some miniscule company, not advertised much, with such a product? There are a few that take thumb drivers (Sandisk), and cards (MSI), but the ones I'd heard sounded terrible, with a cooler looking design than any other factor.

Because they want you buy THAT BRAND NEW player after 6 months
If current one is already perfect, you hardly do this

Well the majority of people who buy DAPs don't even know what codecs are. They buy them to play music. Companies tailor to their consumers. The lack of codec and feature support is not what the public wants right now simply because the public is ignorant.

Ignorant and much happier than the average HA user.

For the longest time I was DAP-less because there was nothing out there that satisfied me. So after I compromised and changed my demands, I bought a DAP (Zen Xtra 40GB), flaws and all. What I realised was that not only could I live with the player's flaws but I had been "suffering" for too long by waiting for the perfect product that never came. Unfortunately, for particular people like us, you probably aren't going to get what you want so you might as well learn to control your desires and seek happiness in what is available.

Yes, hence adding the rant part. But why not make a good one, and maybe make a new case style, and give it a bit better battery life every year or so *sigh*? My Sony died and I need a new one, but it costs as much then as now even for a decent CD player. Unlike most people who feel they can spend money all the time on them, I want soemthing that will be horribly obsolete when I buy a new part--not dead.

It was so easy back when I got my DJC01, when all but Rio and Sony players were crap, and flash players really were uselss.
I guess if buying CDs doesn't break my funding, I'll get an iRiver 799/899.

Rio seems to make decent flash players w/ expansion cards and good battery life (30 hours?). Unfortunately the flash players don't seem to be from the same team that likes to throw in extra formats (like karma, empeg, rio receiver).

Iriver is lacking expandable memory in their toblerone players.

Nex has flash cards and has mentioned ogg/vorbis in a future firmware update that hasn't come.

As to flac/lossless, I see a DAP as an edge-of-network device rather than archival. Unless I am recording, I just want an acceptable level (maybe high) of transparency in a player, and don't worry about contaminating any downstream transcode. So, again with the exception of recording, lossless doesn't have much of a place in my DAP world. As it is, I can record wav as long as the disk holds out and as soon as I get home (or to a laptop) that space will get freed up again.

As far as format is concerned, MP3 is the important one. Even transcoding, I see no reason to use anything different (and of course if I expect to be in a quiet environment, forget transcoding).

I actually hadn't noticed the Rio players being expandable. Except for the added cost of a MMC reader, not bad. If it can just take a MMC card with files and folders, it might be 90% of ideal (the design is definitely lacking, but if the rest is OK...ack, now iRiver has competition in my mind, and it isn't significantly cheaper). Of course then the question is, how loud is it? The reviews seem to use the included gear (instead of, oh, KSC50 or KSC35). Then, can it be easily worked into aneck strap...hmmm, questions, questions.

-Cerbie, AKA Mr. Prufrock.

One thing to watch out for... I don't recall the brand, but it was not mentioned yet in this thread and was one of the early ones with thumb-drive size players.. it *only* took 128 kb/s CBR mp3. No more, no less, no vbr. The review I saw on Tech-TV mentioned that as a fault, but was still favorable

The flash DAP market is a bit disappointing atm, which was why I got the iRiver 550 cd player, and wait until something i like turns up. Best thing about it, supports gapless ogg!!! But there are many faults with this player too, cd body (lid broke already) and annoying clicks at the beginning of every song (firmware will hopefully clear this up). Perhaps the perfect player for us (cd, flash or otherwise) is impossible to make/sell well in the current market....

Ed

Yes, well, it was my beloved Sony that broke, only for me to find out what while I got it three years ago for $140, it would still cost $150 or more to replace it, with only smaller size and a couple formats as extra features (MP3 and FLAC are really the only formats I'm interested in--I don't want to transcode if I can save some time). However, I found that dying after 2-3 years was common for many of the Sony players. So it came down to flash. I'd rather have a part be horribly obsolete when I want a new one, not dead while I'm still pleased with it.

If the perfect player for me were impossible to sell, they seem to do a pretty good job with the 7xx/8xx. Real UMS now...if it had gapless [LAME] MP3 playback, there would be nothing at all wrong with it. Nothing. The real thing that ticks me off there is that it is flash--seeking information on the device is amazingly fast. Gapless playback among files of a single type should have been a no-brainer a couple years ago.

Some features, like filesystem organization vs. database, I can see, as many non-geeks are too lazy to organize files right the first time. I know several people that way with Ipods. However, for what amounts to a portable hard drive, it seems silly, useless, and convoluted.

Especially with a market as full as the flash MP3 players, somebody would get the whole package right, and advertise the hell out of it.