But I'm looking at stuff at the cheaper end of the range than the rest of you

It's for the wife who wants it for a specific purpose (she's learning the moves to a dance ) but I'm sure it'll get used lots once we have it.

Have so far considered:

ipod Shuffle 1GB

Creative Zen Nano Plus 1GB

or maybe stretch up to an ipod Nano.

My wife is the sort of person who'd much rather copy her files like she would to a USB flash drive, rather than mess around with fancy software. I believe the Zen lets you do this... how about the ipods? OTOH having good software to manage music files might also be useful in the longer term.

Any other players in the sub

If you want something that looks sexy and is cheap, I can get you a cheap Sony flash -based player (512MB / 1GB). You would have to use sonic stage though (god forbib the Connect version of the software). You can even get them in pink

I bought my mum a shuffle for xmas and it works great.. not sure about the drag and drop playback as I've set her up with iTunes.

The unit is very neat and compact but you do have to make do without a screen.

Oh and it comes in pink as well

when I bought my 1gb micro sd card from ebay the other day the same person was selling mp3 players that are just the simple type of ones but they had cards that were 1 or 2 gb for about

the iRiver (s10 ?) recently won the group test for 1Gb players on Channel 5's the Gadget Chow.

The iRiver S10 looks like a nice little player

The creative Zen V plus looks good too.

Hi ZootyRS...

Sorry if someone has already written this somewhere else but thought I'd add a bit before heading off to bed!

I assume the new shuffle is the same inside as the old style as I have and you can't drag and drop music to that. You have to use i-tunes. I was sceptical at first but have actually grown to like the way it works. You can auto fill with random tracks or drag specific songs, albums or artists onto an ipod.

You're not forced to buy music or use the Apple format as it works with proper MP3 files too. You can download free podcasts without registering too if I remember rightly!

You can still drag and drop other files onto the shuffle as these sit outside the hidden files that i-tunes uses on the player. There's a tool in i-tunes that lets you adjust how much space to allocate to music and how much to plain storage.

Mines the 1 gig version and I regularily have 500 or so songs on it at 64Kbps each. They're advertised as holding 240 at 128kbps.

I like the shuffle idea as I only put songs on from artists I like so generally get to hear something I'll enjoy! However my girlfriend has a 1 gig Nano and thats quite funky too! As easy to use but get the benefit of being able to choose playlists and look a photo collections on the colour screen!

G'nite.

Foureyes.

PS - I haven't got shares in Apple!!

Thanks all - I'll get comparing your suggestions

Pixi / Tfboy - a link or model name/number would be great so I can check them out. Cheers!

I'll PM you shortly with the details from the seller.

Another option is Samsung. They make some decent small players and have a good reliability record, as do the iPods. Sony's on the other hand do not.

The iRiver S10 is very good but you may also want to consider the Creative Zen Stone. It's not out just yet but is extremely good value (

I have a Sandisk Sansa 280 (8gb - they do a 2 and a 4, possibly a 1). It seems jolly good so far. Battery life is good, it's small, the menus work and the sound quality is fine.