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

[example22.livejournal.com]

Count one more for Creative. I got a 40GB Zen Xtra about 18 months ago, and have since upgraded the HDD to 80GB (it turns out you can pretty much just open the back and swap in a standard laptop drive).

Creative's software is godawful, though. It's worth shelling out $25 for Notmad Explorer (www.redchairsoftware.com), which lets you do cool stuff like streaming music over your home network when the USB cable is connected, or running SQL queries against your music collection...