I am also a new user of an mp3 player. I received a gift certificate that covered half of the cost, and I'd been considering getting one for ages, so I let this be the push to go look and decide what would work for me. Those players with the screens are mighty appealing, but I will use mine only for radio (yes, I figured out how to do it and preset my stations--it isn't difficult if you read the instructions), music, and books, not visual stuff. My player is a Samsung 2gig digital audio player (YP-U2J) with a small screen and the same kind of organizing you discuss, though it tells me to use Windows Media Player to rip the CDs and load them to my player. I've figured it out (with the help of my 14-year-old son) but I've had a slightly different problem along the same lines.

I practiced loading a few music CDs, but I got this because I want to listen to downloaded radio programs (got that figured out) and books on tape. Those aren't cooperating so well. I tried with a five-CD book to put it under one artist and tracks are all mixed up, like a book by William Burroughs. I took that all out of the player (after so carefully trying to fix it by getting the names all uniform and numbering the CDs and tracks chronologically) and tried several times. Even when I put in each disk as separate albums but named so I know which is first and second, etc. it still manages to order the tracks in such a way that I'm listing to 1 then 11 then who knows what. I gave up on the big book for a while and am trying with some short stories. Those seem to be arranged better by the producer and they are read in the proper order (with two or three stories per CD).

I can't use any Explorer programs to move files around on the player itself, either. I have to do it on the computer and then put them on the player.

I waited a long time to get this--I wanted one with a good amount of space, a reasonable price, and really easy to use. This has a USB plug on one end (no wires except the headphone) and it recharges when it is plugged into the computer. I saw some other types with slightly longer battery life, but this one is good at about 15 hours.

SRS