Meet Gregor.

Gregor is my new MP3 player, a Sansa e250. Generally, I'm satisfied:

• hefty, substantial feel
  
• fairly intuitive controls
  
• FM tuner/recorder and a voice recorder
• expandable memory via a micro-SD socket on the side
• sleek black front and a metallic back
• right price

Price and fragility kept me away from the Nano, despite my love of all things Apple. (Have you heard the horror stories about broken Nano screens?) I'd certainly rather have the biggest harddrive-based iPod with iTunes support, but that's not in my financial picture at the moment. Maybe later. (Maybe sooner. Andrew just bought a 30gb iPod Video with his own money, and I'm already feeling iPod Envy.)

My complaints about Gregor are mostly with computer connectivity. Neither of my Macs recognize him, even though he should appear as just another portable drive. If he did, I would click and drag tunes to the proper folder and be done with it.

Instead, I'm forced to use Windows Media Player 11 to sync Gregor with my music folders on my Dell laptop.

If you've used WMP 11, you might well be laughing and nodding and sputtering "kludge" at this very moment, especially if you allowed it to install "Urge" on your harddrive. (Urge is the brainchild of the MTV networks.)

So, WMP doesn't want to rip my disks. It gives me an error message and refers me to the Microsoft braintrust whose response is "Huh? Never heard of that problem before." Which means that I rip my disks in Win iTunes and tell WMP to search the iTunes folder for new music. You'll be pleased to learn that WMP is smart enough to do that much. I then select the new music, drag it to the "Sync" column on my screen, click on "Sync Now" and (*whew!*) I sit back until I'm told that I can disconnect Gregor. It just shouldn't be so difficult to put music on your music player.

[Aside: soon after I installed WMP 11 and Urge, I began having trouble. The computer took much more time than usual to start up. Services -- like my antivirus software and my wireless network monitor -- were prevented from starting. My problems went away after I uninstalled Urge. Caveat emptor.]

As for Gregor himself, his thumbwheel -- the blue plastic circle -- is awkward. Not unmanageable, and certainly not a showstopper, but not iPod smooth. And that's the only complaint I have with Gregor Sansa.

O.K., one other thing: I have a problem with earbuds. I must have mutant ears because (unlike most other sentient music fans) I spend more time putting them back into my ears than actually listening to music. A set of $15 in-the-ear, over-the-head Sony headphones ended my problem with popping buds.

So, if you see me on the bus, speak loudly. I'll be listening to Gregor.

Update: after two hours of torture making a playlist in WMP11, I investigated why the p.o.s. wouldn't rip my cd's. I had to edit the Windows Registry to allow me to rip at 128 kbps. All better.

Microsoft -- Tweak it and it will work.