wow...
i'm not reading all of that.
i'm on my third mp3 player. first had a creative movu 128, it was very cool and small but it stopped working just after the warrenty was up, i have no idea why. then i got a digitalway 128 from future shop, it was a piece of crap, frustraing to use and had terrable support with windows.
Now i have an ipod mini 6gb. I got it because there was a special 125 dollers off for getting it with an audible.com subscription. I love it compared to the first two. it is super easy to use and works very well with winamp (i like winamp a hell of a lot better than itunes). I don't knw where people are getting the idea it has sound problems, mine sounds great. and as far as people complaining about the quality loss in changing from wma to mp3, its not that noticable. unless you have a soundcard with pristine A/D converters (RME perhaps?) and phenomenal speaker with great high eq, you probably wouldn't notice at all. Not any more than converting a .wav to an mp3 in the first place. my 0.02