Recommendations for a new mp3 player

Okay, I currently have a really old school 4GB iPod mini. And I need to upgrade. Why? Because I have a huge-ass music collection because I am a music whore and 4GB is not enough.

So, looking for any advice! I don't like ads or electronics stores because they're all biased. So I've come here for advice!

What I want:
-20GB or more of space. This is the single most important thing. I will simply not take an mp3 player with less, although if it's shiny enough, I may settle for 16GB.
-Playlists, if I can. I like the ability to put together a playlist and play that.
-Something cost effective. Seriously.
-The ability to group songs together and when I have it on shuffle, those grouped songs will be played together. The one feature iTunes has that I wish I could do on my iPod.

I must admit, I've become very accustomed to the iPod's controls and I had a play with an iPod touch today and it was very shiny, so I'm probably biased towards that. But if anyone has any other recommendations, I'm all ears.

As you already mentioned, iPod Touch. Awesome, shiny and awesome. The sound is great, touch screen works perfectly and jailbroken ('hacked' firmware) brings even more possibilities to the device. (2nd generation is not supported with jailbreaking yet )

I got one myself and I play with it for at least an hour every day, Appstore apps are srsly addicting.

Not sure what you mean by cost-effective. I would go for the 32 GB iPod Touch just because of all the features and if you're used to iPod controls already, you won't feel awkward using it. But the 32 GB iPod touch is nearly $400 here in Canada, at least.

After running into multiple problems with the iPod, I ditched it and went to buy a Creative ZEN. The one that's credit card size. So far for the past year, I haven't had any problems. The program to upload is easy to understand and the battery life is reasonable. The playlist options aren't hard to set, but I'm not sure about that shuffling option you're talking about. It goes up to 32 GB I believe, and has a SD card slot on the top for you to upgrade yourself if you run out of space. The 16GB is about $179.99, not sure about the 32 GB one. But there's a newer version now, the Zen X-Fi.

Creative Zen isn't known for having the best firmware. Their players are a nice alternative from iPods, but in my experience I'd say that you should get something a little more reliable that won't become a shiny paperweight.

Are you looking for a flash based or hard drive player? If you're looking for at least 20gb of memory, hard drive would be more cost-efficient. Of course, there are few players that range between 16 and 32gb, so you'd probably have to choose between those two. If you're an audiophile, you would probably want EQ settings to customise the playback. In this case, I'd stay away from the third gen Zunes, because they don't have that option (at least for the flash based players.. I'm not quite sure about the HD ones)

I'm in the market for another mp3 player as well, since my old Zen is a bit too bulky to say, exercise with. The best advice I could give you for looking for new electronics is to do a lot of research. Since I'm personally super picky about what I buy, I do a ton of research. You can use sites like http://www.cnet.com to read reviews. They're pretty unbiased, since their job is basically to write reviews on electronics. I'm not sure of how detailed they would be about the playlist function that you're looking for, though. It sounds like the main thing you're looking for is the option to make a playlist and shuffle the playlist. Zens and Sony Walkmans can do that, I think.

Some of the players that have pretty good reviews are the Cowon D2 and iAudio 7, Sony Walkman A series (comes in 16gb at the highest, I think), and Zunes.

Zunes seem nice

I am looking for a new one too... my old Funtwist went mono-channel...for an odd reason after 3 years. Bleh, oh well... it's pretty old, it was even on USB 1.0 x_X

Looking for another Funtwist though... they don't have the model I want stocked in Aus T__T

Creative Zen isn't known for having the best firmware. Their players are a nice alternative from iPods, but in my experience I'd say that you should get something a little more reliable that won't become a shiny paperweight.

Exactly what happened to my Zen. I initially loaded and edited from a computer not hooked up to internet and had no problems with it. Later on, I got internet, and so I figure, why not go for a firmware upgrade? Well, now it's totally screwed and I copy songs over to the Zen, and then when its finished, I'm still left with an empty Zen.

I got a free Shuffle from a promotion at my bank, and I've been using that. Small, but effective. However, I use it at work, and the one function I loved about the Zen was it had a lock so I could put it in my pocket and not worry about hitting the buttons. Not so with the shuffle, every once in a while, I'll bump against something and I'll accidentally change songs or the volume or something.