MP3 player recommendations?

[Sicks.ps]

lol, i disabled itunes auto start up, i dont let it do anything, i occasionally get apple software update pop ups but i just ignore them and they dont make me tab out of games, i only use itunes to update my music to my ipod

[Carbon.ps]

the only time i've had an ipod break is when i let my mum borrow it and she dropped it in a puddle but she bought me a new one for the following christmas xD

i know they arent as cheap as others but the only bad experience ive had with ipods is itunes but you only need to use that to upload the songs from pc to ipod, also with my ipod it has 80gb memory and i can use it as an external hard drive if i choose, i have 2000+ songs on it right now and its only 20gb of music, ive used it to hold films and tv shows etc, i have one of those fancy ones that lets you watch films and such on it

personally id recommend it if you can afford it, never had problems with mine apart from itunes being a crap mp3 player on your pc but i use winamp for that anyway, just boot up itunes to upload new songs to the ipod or rip songs from cd and convert them to mp3 easily, also there is a handy button to "consolodate music library" which automatically moves the files and organises them in itunes directory and sorts by artist/album which is quite nice too, but actually playing songs on it, seems to do nasty things with my sound card

You can use any media player to sync an ipod these days...

[Sicks.ps]

you kids and your technology these days!!

so there goes my only reason to use itunes at all winamp all the way!

[Two monkeys from a Tzu..ps]

UPDATE:
After dragging my feet forever I got myself an Ipod Nano 8gb for my birthday.
While that is at the lower end of the storage specs I was looking at I came to the conclusion that I won't find a player that can hold all of my music anyway ( well at a sane price that is). So I could either wait a few years until 32gb microSDHC will be available for 10 euros or I could listen to music on the go now.

I've never owned an Apple product so I downloaded iTunes beforehand to check it out.
To my surprise I liked it and used it to rip all my old CDs I had in storage at my parents to mp3, that went a lot easier than I thought.
A huge plus is having all my podcasts in one place and easy to get.
The iTunes/iPod interface is a bit more iffy, that whole auto synch 'feature' must have been designed by the devil, I managed to replace the stuff I put on the iPod with everything iTunes managed to shovel on to it three times because I forgot to uncheck a box somewhere until I found the 'manage manual' option. I'd love to have a simpe folder based drag'n'drop interface but I guess that won't be happening because of the way the iPod ui interacts with the files.
The iPod ui itself is really good and a joy to use after a few hours the navigation through the directories became natural and the whole thing looks petty too. I never touched the apple headphones since I had a couple of Panasonic in ear headphones I use for my Nintendo DS.
Thanks again everyone for your recommendations, tune in again in 2013 when I will look for something bigger.

[Hawk.ps]

I could have sold you my 80GB Zune if I could find the cable

[Kelika]

I still use my 6 year old Sony Walkman (20gb hard disc). Still has a battery life of about 20-25 hours after 6 years! (Started with 40 hours according to the box)