Sansa + Rockbox
Humpf. For over two years now, I've loved my MobiBlu Cube 1GB MP3 player. It's tiny... a 1" cube. I use a Sony Fontopia in-ear ear-bud lanyard... it's lightweight and convenient.
It doesn't use proprietary software... it's just a USB drive I drag-and-drop files onto, which is a no-exceptions requirement for me.
So it only has a 1/2" screen... you can only see about five characters at a time in file names, but it beats the screenless Shuffle, right? And it doesn't read meta-data tags... the file name is all you get.
In the past, I've mostly listen to audiobooks, and it's been perfect for that... I don't really need to see anything but a track number, so the small screen hasn't been a problem. It doesn't support Audible directly... I depend on some conversion software to get it out of the proprietary format and into MP3. But that's never been too much of a pain. (It's odd that it isn't Audible-ready... the player Audible used to give away with memberships several years ago was from MobiBlu's company.)
But as my podcast list has grown, I've found that the screen is a pain to navigate when I'm driving. And that 1G limit can be annoying if I actually want to put music on my player at the same time. And there's always the battery problem... the battery is getting worn out and the playback time is getting shorter, and the battery is not user-replaceable. (I'd replace it anyway if I could find one, but I've not found a source for this specific one.)
So here's the deal... awhile back, I bought a refurbished 2GB Sansa e250 through woot.com for $45 after shipping. My plan was to use it for music... MobiBlu for audiobooks and podcasts.
But then I discovered Rockbox. An open-source firmware replacement for several MP3 players... the Sansa e200 series included, of course.
And Rockbox rocks. One of the big requirements for my MP3 player has been bookmarks... the player has to remember where you left off in the MP3 file. Very few do this well. Rockbox does it more than right... it has an optional bookmark manager mode that lets you maintain a library of bookmarks. So I can stop in the middle of an audiobook, catch up on a podcast, get tired of a podcast in the middle, skip to the next one, catch up on the previous one, then go back to my audiobook, always picking up right where I left off.
The Sansa supports MP3, WMA and Audible. Rockbox throws in Ogg-Vorbis, FLAC, AAC and others I've never even heard of... the processing power of the player is large enough to do real-time decoding. I've really wanted to give Ogg a try, but few players support it.
The one thing it doesn't support is DRM... no Audible, no "protected" WMA, no iTunes. But hey, I'm already converting those to MP3 now. And if I get in a bind, Rockbox dual-boots... I can boot the original Sansa firmware at any time. (I burn my iTunes to CD and rip them back to encode to MP3.)
The only real drawback is that the Sansa is a brick compared to the MobiBlu Cube... I can't sling it around my neck conveniently. And that's a pretty big drawback after the convenience of the Cube for two years. I'm going to have to find a way to deal with that... maybe a sturdier lanyard will do the trick.