I’ve been without an audio player since my Samsung YP-F1 was a victim of the ETAP hotel room robberies at the GUADEC conference in Birmingham. Well, I haven’t seen it since then anyway. The YP-F1 was small, pretty, it worked like a USB memory stick, played Ogg Vorbis (essential for me), and recharged without disposable batteries (also essential). But they don’t make them any more.
The YP-F2 doesn’t look too bad. They don’t make that any more either but I think I can still get them here in Germany.
Now there’s the YP-U3, which is not pretty, though not awful. But it seems to need the MTP protocol instead of allowing music to be loaded as a USB mass storage device. Apparently the YP-U2 had the same problem. (Update: Apparently the YP-U2 works fine as a USB mass storage device.) How confident can I be of MTP support in, for instance, Rhythmbox? Even if it works it would annoy me to have to use music player software just to transfer files to the device.
I find just about every other audio player large and ugly.
Update: I bought a Cowon iAudio 7. It plays everything but I hate the interface. It’s very difficult to know what the buttons might do at any time, it’s far too easy to brush the buttons accidentally, and touching a button for a moment extra will cause it to recognize a long press, which generally does something unrelated and unexpected. I also miss the belt clip for running.