My girlfriend needs a fairly cheap (around $100) portable MP3-player to replace her now broken minidisc for recording herself when practicing the violin. She has a Sony ECM-MS907 that she used with the MD that she wants to use with the MP3 player.

The sound quality doesn't have to be extremely fancy, perhaps not even on par with the old MD. Lossless recording is absolutely not a must, but it'd be a big bonus (because then I would consider borrowing it ). As she only records an hour or two (max) a 512MB player would more than do (as long as it doesn't record lossless).

A solid & sturdy player would be good. She's generally not very gentle to her gadgets.

What would you peeps consider? At a first glance the iRiver T20 looks pretty good.

Thanks in advance...

Could it really be that no one has anything to add?

Well, for $100 I'd recommend getting some old iriver's model (preferrably 99x, as they have a nice sturdy metal frame) or iAudio G3/F1. There's not much you can have for $100, really, as most of the stuff of this price segment is either bad or short-lived.

Thanks for the reply. If we bump it up to something like $180?
Still it seems like Neuros, HD MiniDisc, M-Audio MicroTrack or Tascam are the only options for lossless recording.

It won't do lossless, but will do MP3 at 320 kbps, which should be at least as good as ATRAC on the MD, try the iriver 7xx flash recorders. You can still get refurbs from iriver bundled with a waterproof case for less than $100. I don't think the newer irivers record at bitrates higher than 128.

Samsung YP-Z5

Used iriver H120.