davidcook

First, a tangent to the actual question I'm about to ask. ( David grumbles about Genre tags in music files. )

So, on to the actual question : Recommend for me a portable music player.
(not a cassette player or CD/MP3-CD player, because I have one of each already, and they don't fit my needs these days)

( Requirements ! Now behind cut because the list got longer than I expected )

What I'm considering :

iPod, of course. My main concerns are the battery (and battery life), robustness, not being able to copy things back off, and as I understand it, the only interface is through iTunes (no Linux version, I presume).

Flash-based players in general, in particular expandable ones (SD cards preferred, since I can also use those in the camera).

The Rio Forge seems to meet most of those requirements, but it seems that quite a few people have had reliability problems with them, and had bad experiences with Rio support. Also, the sound quality is apparently not quite up to the standard of other players.

Other hard drive-based players - I haven't looked into these in great detail, though.

I'm in two minds whether I want to be able to carry my whole music collection around with me (which requires at least a 20 Gb hard disk player), or whether I can select a few albums according to my mood (should be able to fit 7-10 albums on a 512 Mb SD card, depending on quality, plus a few more in whatever internal memory the device comes with) every week or so and just play those.

So, any suggestions ? Any devices I've overlooked ? Are newer generations of iPod improved in the areas I'm concerned about ?
Is Rio really so horrible ? Will anyone read this, or will it succumb to the Weekend LiveJournal Effect[TM], where everyone is running around doing stuff and not reading LJ ?