MP3 players -- geek wisdom sought

[undyingking]

I'm thinking about getting an MP3 player, but rather than go into the tiresome business of researching the market myself, I thought I'd see if any of you guys are reasonably up to speed and could make recommendations!

Required features:

• lots of storage (10s of GB);
• decent sound quality;
• easy to hook up to PC;
• most important, easy to hook up to hifi aux in, ie. to act as a de facto hifi component;
• can run off mains;
• decent battery etc performance
• decent headphones (or, ability to replace headphones with decent ones).

Not-required features:

• considerations of portability / durability etc (unlikely to take it anywhere more exotic than the garden);
• support for dozens of obscure / proprietary file formats;
• wonderfully intuitive / one-button interface (it's likely to live on shuffle);
• coolour screen etc;
• stunning looks.

And a price of somewhere around the £150-200 mark I guess. Any thoughts?

(Do these things come with digital radios at all these days? That would be cool.)

Comments

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

But wait... I know little of all this, but I though iPods were problematic because of the difficulty of using non-iTunes music with them. Is this not the case ?

[secondhand-rick.livejournal.com]

Lack of restriction to iTunes wasn't a specification requirement, though I know it does irk some folks.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Consider it implicit.

[bibliogirl.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure if you mean "non-iTunes music" in the sense that I think it's tougher to get stuff on to the iPod other than via iTunes, but iPods will happily play plain ol' MP3s which have been generated through (many) other means.