Missed a day. Dang and drat! Well, I've been trying to decide on an MP3 player since getting Ms Viki one (a Samsung Yepp that's tiny and which she can wear to the gym). Mine had to be different. I was also doing research on getting a small digital recorder to do two-system sync sound with my DV camera. (The pre-amp in the DV cam is not so good, and good sound does make a flick look better.)

First, I was looking at Minidisc players, but they have this silly copyright protection scheme that limits the number of times something can be copied, and none of the portable consumer Minidisc units have a digital out. Hop on over to the semi-pro and pro models and you're conservativey looking at $1K and up.

Looked into other solutions, including flash (SD and CF) memory models, which took me into a strange world where Phish concert bootleggers and Russian Israeli spy equipment dealers rubbed shoulders. Finally, today I settled on a Archos Jukebox 20 Recorder. Has S/PDIF (optical) digital in/out (plus analog, too). 20 GB hard disk, USB 2.0 port, CF slot, but only does MP3. Other choices were the Nomad Jukebox3 (firewire and WMA, WAV, etc), and Apple iPod. Now for a pre-amp. There's even some folks in Sweden hacking the firmware.