"...go to somewhere like PC World and get one of their techie guys to give you advice..."

That's not my experience with PC world, I'm afraid. Generally speaking, they may have the jargon, but they don't have the know how. That's if you can find one of them in the first place.

So I'd sooner get my advice here.

My son gave me a nice little MP3 player for my birthday, a Matsunichi326. Very small, beautiful sound. I've been using it to hold stuff from CDs, and also for live recording in sessions - I'm not really interested in downloading from the net, except where the music is only available that way.

What I've been doing is make MP3 files from CDs and store them on my computer, and load and unload them on the palyer as and when I feel like it, from the store on the PC, or on CD-Rs where I've put them to save hard drive space.

Now I'm looking into the options for something reasonably cheap that can hold more music (or speech) at a time. The one I've got has 256MB, so a bit more memory would be handy. However the only way of finding tracks is to scroll through them, and that would be a bit of a pain if I had significantly more memory to play with, so it'd be good to be able to be able to store the tunes or the chapters in accessible folders.

So if anyone out there could do better than the PC "techies" on this, I'd be grateful.

While I'm about it - for turning CD tracks into MP3 files I've been using a program called FreeRIP (sounds a bit like a cut-rate Murder Inc...) which does a great job, but takes its time about it. Takes round an hour to process a CD. Anyone know a good one that's significantly faster?