For what you want, any player would work fine. Your best bet is to go to Best Buy or something and try out the ipod, creative zen, or the one from microsoft, and others and find out which one you like best for the price. But, for someone who is going to be playing music on a home theater system, MP3's are garbage. Sure they are convenient, like in the car or while jogging or not wanting to change cd's, but when you are seriously listening to music, like in a home theater environment, MP3's destroy the high fidelity audio that CD's and Vinyl Records provide. MP3 is called "lossy" audio compression, which means when you encode a CD into the MP3 format, the encoder throws out data that it thinks is inaudible to humans. This "inaudible" data is usually the attenuation of bass or the distortion of higher frequencies such as cymbol crashes or the high frequencies of a violin. The sound quallity gets even worse as you go down the bit rate ladder. I can deal with 320 Kbps MP3's at low volumes, but anything lower, like 128 Kbps, sound terrible. Try listening to XM radio at a store demo hooked up to a good pair of speakers, you will hear what I am talking about. I believe they encode their music at around 96 Kbps or lower using their own proprietary codec, but it still sounds terrible. Basically encoding CD's to MP3 destroys the subtle harmonics of music into a pile of digital mush that sounds harsh and tinny and personally, makes me want to grind my teeth. For the best audio quality and convenience, I would recommend a 300 CD changer that goes for around $200, about the same price you would pay for a MP3 player.
