My Karma's dead, the iAUDIO won't synch playlists (drag and drop and then build playlists on the player) and hasn't played my .ogg stuff either.

My media consists of music which is all MP3, and radio that is encoded from mp2 (DAB) to ogg. The Karma was ideal because it played ogg, and it supported bookmarks in a way that I could relate to (the iAUDIO bookmark feature bookmarks tracks, not where you are in a playlist)

A: Is there ANY player that has a similar interpretation of bookmarks?

B: Is there another player that I can synch via playlists

C: If there's a player that does a + b does it also play ogg

Should I not worry about ogg compatibility and just encode to AAC and get an iPOD

OR get something else that will synch with WMP and encode to wma

Any thoughts appreciated.

Surely you can deal with the ogg issue by just encoding your MP2s as MP3s (or just leaving them as MP2s and many players which can play MP3s also play MP2s).

I haven't found a player that'll play mp2 audio files.

I used to convert to MP3 but a lot of files errored in encoding, there are occasionally bit rate changes that LAME doesn't like resulting in a non encoded or non listenable file.

Ah yes, DAB and its bit rate changes. I guess you need to experiement with some different command line MP2 decoders until you can find one that can emit clean WAV data for LAME to consume.

As part of your MP2-OGG process you are probably using just such a decoder, unless the OGG tools know how to consume MP2 directly ?

I didn't know that mp2->mp3 involved a decode/encode, I used to use RazorLame as the front end for my encoding, never even considered the fact that it was the decoding that might be the issue. I have no idea whether mp2->ogg does the same, it certainly takes a long time.

Know any players that'll play mp2 audio then?

The bad news is that the Cowon players are some of the more flexible ones out there, even with their limitations (not using ID3 databasing). The somewhat encouraging news is that there may be some new hardware in Q2/Q3, based on SigmaTel's new ref. designs....

Thanks, looks like I'll be able to do an HD transplant that'll keep me going till then.