So, I stumbled across this great little gadget, and it occurred to me that it would be a brilliant concept for a portable mp3 player. It's a car mp3 player that runs off a cigarette lighter socket and reads mp3s directly from a USB thumb drive.

The problem with most USB stick-style portable mp3 players is the cost compared to the same capacity USB stick without MP3 functionality. The player I linked to only costs $27, so obviously making a gadget that reads mp3 from a USB stick is quite simple. Many cheap stereos now also have USB inputs.

So why is it impossible to find a portable mp3 player with no internal memory, just a USB input? Am I not looking hard enough, or is there a good technical/economic reason that i'm unaware of? Does anyone know of such a thing's existence??

Taking the idea further, has anyone tried modding an iRiver or iPod etc to allow it to read from USB sticks? The only expandable-memory mp3 players i've ever seen tend to only accept up to 2GB expanded memory, which seems tiny to me... It would be great to get a player that reads from my 10GB USB stick, and any other larger capacity USB sticks I might get in the future, when 10GB becomes too small...

jon

I have one of those. It works pretty well, but in my case one of the buttons doesn't work - the one that backs up to the start of a song or to the previous song. Other than that I like it a lot.

Not quite what you're looking for, but there are MP3 players with no internal memory which take SD cards. I know of three somewhat different models, with essentially randomly assigned brand names. They are *really* cheap, and you have to be prepared for the first one to be DOA, but they do work. The one that seemed to me better came from Jaycar (which if oz means the same to you as to me, you'll know about--to RoW, electronics chain slightly downmarket from Radio Shack). I used it in the gym, and the only problem was low level of output.

If the USB part is really important, you could get one of those thumbs that takes SD cards.

Not USB, but if you take a look at Amazon's Top Selling mp3 players, number 5 and 6 (the Sansa players) have SD-memory card expansion. These things sell by the caseload.