Supergrass, "Supergrass is 10" (Best-of)
I was a fan of Supergrass, but not enough to ever get any of their CDs. A $10 best-of was hard to pass over, and I'm glad I bought it. It's full of great songs. Their songs are an elegant mix of pop, rock and weird time changes. I believe there was some rivalry between Supergrass and Blur at the time. In a school-yard fight, Supergrass would step on Blur's head. Supergrass are dirtier, more louty, but as a result, more interesting.

Daft Punk, "Musique Vol. 1 1993-2005"
I thought I'd like this more than I did. Another $10 best-of, all it did was remind me they're a bit dull. They're great live though, much like Underworld, who I love. I guess you needed to grow up with them. I suspect a random listen of Underworld's best-of would suck too.

I received an iRiver e100 media player for xmas.

I liked the device specifically for it's native ability to play FLAC and OGG formats as well as MP3.

My initial thoughts after a week or so of playing with it:

Pros:

• 8Gb space beats my old player's 1Gb, especially when using FLAC.
• Plays FLAC files! Lossless joy. Or more importantly, piles of time saved converting to MP3.
• You can browse the contents of the device in "Dir Mode", that is, just list the files and folders and their filenames. Brilliant for when your ID3 tags are a bit screwy.
• I like the various EQ settings. "Rock" seems to be what my ears prefer.
• Nice big screen, nice and small/thin device.
• Easy to use, now that I'm used to it, although I still need to get my head around up and down for skipping tracks instead of left and right.
• You can connect the device as a normal USB key and just copy music to it.
• You can also view photos on it.*
• Firmware update all done via the iRiver Plus 3 software. It automatically detects if your devices needs new firmware, downloads and installs it for you (asking first of course).

Cons:

• Artist / Album order appears random instead of the expected alphabetical.**
• Takes longer than I'd like to skip tracks. Much longer.
• Fast forwarding within a track is horrible. My old player was fast and easy and made nice little fast forward noises. This one skips in a weird way I just can't like. You can at least control the speed of track skimming.
• Buttons feel cheap but seem to be holding up well.
• I'm hearing an audio click between tracks when using FLAC, which is a little irritating.
• It doesn't seem to read FLAC ID3 tags, rendering all FLAC albums as "Unknown Artist". I'm still experimenting with that.
• USB charging. My old player just used a normal AAA battery.

Hopefully firmware upgrades fix the minor irritations I'm having, but even if not, the device plays music in the format I want. Awesome. As I usually use my MP3 player to play entire albums, the track skipping issues aren't really a problem.

* I thought the photo viewing would be a stupid gimmick but a good use for it has occurred to me. We often head on down to Tyabb to look for antiques and old crap. One thing I collect is old coffee-table books on Melbourne. I have a bad memory and often forget if I have a book or not. Having a nice little device full of photos of the covers would save me a lot of time. But then, so would printing out a piece of paper...

** If I'd known the issue with the Artist / Album order it could have been a deal breaker. Vague articles on the net seem to indicate the ordering can be controlled via the iRiver Plus software, but that's insane. The device should just do it, period. Luckily it orders album's tracks properly (ie. Track number order).

Update: I notice that Wikipedia claims the device will play FLV files (ie. flash video as used on YouTube). That's pretty cool... I must try that.