Solid Budget Player

This thing is dirt cheap. Buy.com has these going for $25. It has a screen so you can select your songs, you can't do that on Apple's shuffle. It also holds more than a shuffle. It has a rechargeable battery with decent life and an FM tuner. It can also display photos. One great feature is the micro SD expansion slot. So if 2gb becomes filled you can add more memory in the future without having to ditch the player.
Adding music is easy, you can drag and drop into the folder or you can use windows media player to sync music. This way you can keep track of the memory available.

That's a lot for a cheap player but it does have some draw backs. The interface isn't as slick and the screen isn't as clear as some of the other more expensive players. But for navigating through songs it works. You can organize by genre, artist, or album. The FM tuner gets so so reception, and the voice recorder quality is passable.
Sound quality is not the best, but for the average listener it won't matter (stock headphones always suck but everyone seems happy anyway).


If you want an expendable music player that you can bang around with at the gym, this is it.