>>My niece got a portable MP3 player, .... As near as I can tell ... the computer simply recognizes this as two removable drives.

I thought this was such a good idea I took my own advice and went out and bought one. After doing some research, I decided on the RIO Cali Sport (128 MB internal memory) plus a 256 MB SC memory card (the kind that's also used in digital cameras, it appears).

Much to my chagrin, the computer does NOT recognize this device the same as it recognizes a USB drive. I can (and did) copy wma files to it (using Windows Media Player), and can play them without a problem, but it does not show up in Explorer as an additional drive, meaning I can't read and write to it as I would a USB drive.

I'm pretty sure I wasn't imagining it - my niece's MP3 player did show up as a separate drive in Windows Explorer (actually 2 drives, d: and e:) but it appears this is not the case for all MP3 players; and, since using it as a removable storage drive is a non-standard use for it, there's no way to tell by reading the specs if it can be used this way or not.

Fwiw, the MP3 player my niece got had the brand name "Rush" and is apparently made by Philips. I can't find the particular model on the Philips web-site (or anywhere else) and, knowing my brother, I suspect they may have picked up a discontinued (or soon-to-be- ) model at a close-out sale.

So it's not as good an idea as I thought, but it's still a really cool MP3 player <img src="images/graemlins/cool.gif" alt="" />