REPOST - I have the old 40 gig RCA player... (Score 2, Interesting)

It's the Lyra RD2840. It's got it's faults but overall it's a great player for what I need it to do.

Initially, it had lots of problems. You couldn't resume a track from where you left off if you turned the unit off and back on, the track would start over. If you had both mp3s and wma files on it, there was static when it switched between the 2 formats. Shuffle was buggy, etc... these were all fixed in a recent firmware upgrade though. FFW is slow on mine, but not as slow as the review says it is on the new model. Playback isn't gapless, but it's "pretty close." Battery life so far seems to be about 10 hours continuous play, 7-8 if I shuffle around, so that's not bad. It comes with an AC adapter, cigarette lighter adapter, carrying case, and the headphones are better than the typical stock headphones.

The downside: For some reason, the line-out is a 1/16" jack instead of the usual 1/8" headphone sized. An adapter is included though. Also, it requires a 5.5v AC adapter, which I have had trouble locating online... so if you lose your adapter I'm not sure what you'd do. Occasionally, if you shuffle around to songs that aren't in order, the song will start about 1/2-1 second into the track.

The one feature that sold me, over everything else, is that it's one of the few players that doens't require any special software. It's recognized as a standard external USB drive, you just copy files over to it like you would any normal drive (so you can also use it to store other files besides music). There IS a Windows system tray application that you use to "profile" the device, which scans all the id3 tags so that you can browse your songs by artist/genre/album/etc. But you don't need to use it, because the player has a profiling feature built in! It's just a little slower than using the windows app.

In other words, this player is PERFECT for linux users.

And, they're cheap. I got mine refurbished on ebay for only $160. At that price, for a 40 gig player that includes all the accessories and requires no software and runs effortlessly under Linux I don't mind the few faults it has!