Hi everyone! Whoa the bbs looks different!

I'm on the hunt for a new mp3 player and figured you guys would be the experts on it. The one feature that I'm really hungry for is something that the empeg had from day 1: Auto-resume even after a sync. I've been Googling for this, but it's one of those features that people don't ask for because they've never had it. Not much has turned up in my search.

I listen to a lot of podcasts and will load like 20 - 30 tracks at a time. They are all from the same podcast with each track being one "hour" of the broadcast. I already have to load them into a software and re-tag them with track numbers to get them to play in order. What I'd love to do is be able to add tracks to the player and remove old ones without waiting until I get to the end of a 30 minute track to do so. It's like my timing needs to be "just right" in order to arrive at home and not be in the middle of a podcast.

It doesn't matter to me if the play list is even resumed. I can queue it up again and skip to where I need to be. But I hate fast-forwarding 15 minutes into a track to resume.

Other than that, I'd prefer something rugged, flash memory (no hard drive!) and 2gb or larger. Right now, I use a Sansa m240 by SanDisk and love it. The buttons are large so I can control it blindly without looking and it was cheap enough that if I crush it at work - no worries! I got it for $50 and don't mind if it lasts only 1 year (2 so far!).

Do you guys have any suggestions?

For podcasts and audio books, the iPods do save the position, and retain it during syncs. The handy thing is that it even syncs the positional data back to the computer, so I can start a podcast on my iPhone, sync to the Mac when I get home, then resume listening at my desk via the computer. If I want to go mobile again, another sync will send the time info back to the iPhone and resume when I select it to play.

While I have never been as impressed with the iPods for general music playback compared to the Karma or empeg, the podcast support is why I bought an iPod nano, and then part of the reason for the iPhone later.

I know for certain that my Archos 604 WiFi will resume after file transfers, but I do not use syncing because it would require me to use WMP as a media manager. So I just use the player as a mass storage device, which is my preferred method anyway. Still, after every connection to the PC, the player has to update its library. Even after that, I can always resume my track (there's a dedicated resume button in the main menu). I can resume video files as well.

I use it for listening to podcasts in the car as well, and what you're saying is also important to me.

I can only speak for the 604 WiFi here, which is last-gen hardware and software. The current model is the 605. However, I wouldn't be surprised if this is the kind of thing that carried through to their other products, and you'd probably be able to ask on the forums if you wanted to find out.

The Karma and TrekStor vibez come to mind.



I never knew about that. That's a very cool, very handy feature.

Thanks guys! Good to know I'm not the only one appreciating a feature like this!