New toy found

I'm tired of fighting with the Audiophase CDM375 that I picked up for $20 on sale at Best Buy last fall. It's truly a case of "you get what you pay for." It does a half-decent job of playing back CDs, MP3s, and WMAs, but that's it.

I've been attempting to use it to listen to the audiobook version of Wizard's First Rule while driving, but I quickly found out that the unit has serious issues with seeking if the audio files are more than 16 minutes long (the audiobook I got has them broken up into 45-minute files). It takes 20-30 minutes for me to get to or from work, so I end up stopping midway through a file. Manually splitting the files into 15 minute chunks was my only solution, but I'm still unhappy with how slow the unit is in loading so many files, not to mention the frustration of the burned CDs I wasted trying to figure out what the problem was in the first place.

One of the articles in today's CNET newsletters was for cheap digital audio players, including the Lexar LDP-200. It's small and inexpensive and its capacity is limited by the size of the SD memory card you put in. It sounds like a simple, no-frills unit and that's all that I'm looking for. The only catch is that it only seems to be available online, so I'll need to make sure to make sure I pay more than the minimum on my credit card to afford the purchase. =)