I have a rip-off 4 gb mp3 player that I got brand new on Ebay from Hong Kong. It tends to act weird once in a while (It seems to have something against Bob Marley), but other than that... it works great... worth every cent... is really small... and got me through 3 hours of pressure cleaning green slime off the floor at work yesterday.
Yay!! I have one and I've never had any problems with it. I've had it for about six months now and I'm still putting music into it. My music collection is really spread out and far less organized than I thought it was.
I never lug around any cds. I burn a data disc with 8-12 albums or 125 or 150 songs on one cd and that is good for a week of walking around. Than I switch cds when I want to. daily if need be. so music is limitless and everchanging, very easily at that, if I want too. my discman is pretty small, fits in my pocket. if I understand, it is a bit of a pain to transfer music onto an ipod and delete things and add other things, ad nausea. But putting 10 albums onto the burning software, waiting 3-4 minutes till the burner is done writing the cd is easy as pie. As long as it is a discman that plays mp3 cds. plus having cds with many albums is good backup and easy to transfer to another hard drive if a computer crashes.
there are also mini disc players... i used to use one back when they first came you, you can put a bunch of cds onto one disk and haul it with you instead. smaller than a box of cigarettes, the on ei used was like2.5" by 2.5" and only half an inch deep or so
I wouldn't go out and buy one. But if someone wanted to give me one for free, I wouldn't turn it down.