I ripped all of my CDs some time ago and have been happily using MC for over a year. I use MC (v11) to stream music to various PCs I have set up around the house expressly for playing music. I am now ready to get a portable player and would appreciate any recommendations.
Since I do not yet have one of these devices, I am not familiar with all of their capabilities. However, I want something that works well with MC, has a large capacity (>30GB), is relatively small (similar to ipod), can be played through my car's stereo, and can play playlists shuffled.
I have been having a lot of difficulty researching this last point. I often play MC by picking several songs (or genres, artists, etc.) that I would like to hear, queuing them in the "Playing Now" list, and hitting shuffle. This way I can listen to the type of music I want , but also have a bit of variety in terms of the ordering of the songs. I thought that I could get roughly the same functionality out of a portable by building a number of playlists in MC and then playing a list shuffled on the portable.
I am leaning toward an iPod or Zen, but I would love to hear as many opinions as possible. Do either of these devices do exactly what I want? Or perhaps something better? Should I be considering any other devices? Does your favorite device do something really cool that I should consider? By the way, all of my music is in ape format. What is the best way/format to get this musics onto my portable? (I plan to keep all of my music on a single large portable, so swapping music on the portable should not be much of an issue.) Also, I am not terribly concerned with cost, as I expect this device to get a lot of use.
Thanks for any feedback you can provide.