I'm asking because I just bought one today and I'm playing around with it. This thing is SOOOO COOOOL man. I found it at CompUSA earlier today and it was just $49.99!!! (I just found out earlier this evening that people have found it for less *after* rebates though). It's a USB 1.1 external CDR/W drive that plays MP3 and *cough* Windows Media files. I'm in the process of testing it for VBR compatibility since almost every single song I have encoded was done with LAME 3.90.2 -aps (thousands of songs, that took a while).

What happened? Did the initial price-to-market scare the bejeezus out of folks (it hit the shelves at $399 I believe) but it can be had now for a mere pittance compared to other portable mp3 players and it's virtually unlimited as far as storage goes. Just buy some more 185MB/210MB CDRs and burn away.

I'm playing around with AAC these days and I was just wondering what went wrong with this unit since I'm enamored of it right now. YES I still want an iPod but for now I'm quite happy carrying around a few 3" mix CDs I'm about to burn with this thing.

It's definitely worth a look if you're still in the market for a no-frills portable mp3 player that can do other things also (it's a portable burner natively supported by Windows XP so no drivers needed - just plug it in and burn).