I was interested in looking for that "Terratec" player on the Web, but www.terratec.com is a different company. Perhaps you could help me find the site?

I've seen several players advertised on the web that supposedly play from burned CDR's. While a lot of folks specifically want that as a feature, it's not the market being targeted by the Empeg. The whole reason for the Empeg is so that you don't have to carry around extra CD's in your car. 650 megabytes would store only a mere fraction of someone's CD collection, so you end up being stuck lugging around more CD's again.

It's fascinating how the MP3 player market is splintered into all these different groups based on the storage media. You have the low-capacity players like the Rio, the high-capacity hard-disk players like the Empeg/MP Shuttle (and that walkman-style hard-disk player whose name I cannot remember), and then the CD-ROM players.

I don't see why anyone would possibly want a low-capacity MP3 player. But products like the Rio prove that there is definitely a market for it. Perhaps we'll see some breakthroughs in solid-state storage technology that allow high capacities without a hard disk?

So far, I don't think any of the big-name consumer electronics companies have put out an MP3 player. You have to admit that it's inevitable-- we'll see Sony and Panasonic MP3 players pretty soon. I wonder how they'll do it?