Were you so picky about your own holiday gifts that you wanted to shop for the most special present yourself? That's the way I felt about MP3 players. And even with the plethora of portable players on the market, there wasn't one that rated five stars in my book.

Inexpensive portable players didn't have enough memory or didn't support both WMA and MP3. Higher-end players with removable memory cards were too expensive, and hard-drive players were too awkward or too Mac-centered. Too many players suffered from annoying copy protection schemes that crippled my ability to transfer music I paid for.

Here's my checklist for the perfect MP3 player.

WMA and MP3. When I want to stuff a lot of songs on a small memory card, Microsoft WMA encoded at 64 Kbps is adequate for noncritical listening, and it gives me an hour of music per 32MB. For recording on PCs with big hard drives and for mastering MP3 CDs for in-car playback, I prefer MP3 at 192 Kbps, because the sound is good enough for virtually everyone, and MP3 is more universal.

SD memory—maybe CF. The memory card standard most likely to endure for the next several years is Secure Digital, or SD. You'll see more notebooks this year with SD card slots and more digital cameras as well. Capacity is now as high as 512MB per card. Compact Flash's popularity has peaked, but it's still widely available. There's not much future for SmartMedia, and a player that accepts only MMC cards (the skinny brother to SD) won't accept the more prevalent SD cards. The one downside to SD is the postage-stamp size: It's too easy to lose cards from time to time.

Multiple battery types. Rechargeable batteries are nice, but you may not want to carry the charger on trips. So you should be able to use one-shot alkaline batteries, too.

No copy protection. Virtually all SD and Memory Stick players make you check out music to the player or card. If you inadvertently grab that card for digital photos and do a quick in-camera format, you have to re-rip the music on your source PC. You can't just declare the music lost and undo the checked-out marker flag. It's a pain. No matter how much and how often I pay for the same piece of music, most musicians are going to starve, and a handful are going to have way too much money.

Direct USB 2 download. I want the choice of downloading from my PC to the player or to the card, and downloads should be by USB 2. USB 1.1 is just too slow, and FireWire (IEEE 1394) is nowhere near universal on PCs.

Hard drive bells and whistles. I'd like a hard drive–based player to double as a backup device for my notebook PC, and also to store off-loaded photos from my digital camera when I'm traveling.

In my shopping, I found that players at $100 or less were too limited, mostly because of fixed memory. The better removable-memory-card players were just too expensive ($200 plus), making the hard drive–based players look attractive.

Of the hard drive players that aren't big and clunky, Apple iPod is the hands-down best choice, but only if you own a Mac. We've had trouble making Mac software work well on PCs, and the iPod still suffers from copy protection hassles, a FireWire (not USB 2) connection, and low capacity/high price (5GB for $300, 20GB for $500). The Archos Jukebox 20 is an incredible deal: $250 street for 20GB, USB 2, and the ability to double as a portable hard drive. But once you've seen the iPod, you can't possibly love the Archos interface.

Because I saw so few improvements in digital music players, I decided to stick with my SD-based Panasonic SV-SD80 ($250), because it's tiny, it has a weatherproof shell that also holds an alkaline battery, and it includes a nifty charging cradle. I'll just live with its copy protection hassles and special RealPlayer software.

Meanwhile, I'm waiting for a savvy PC vendor—hello, Dell? HP?—to build a USB 2 hard-drive player with a decent interface, a 20GB drive, and a $250 price. I fear, however, that if a PC maker decides to load up on features, you'll wind up with an overkill $500 device that also downloads and stores JPEGs from your camera, plays video clips through a small LCD, and does voice recording. Then you've reinvented the PocketPC.

Copyright © 2004 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in PC Magazine.