I’m looking for a portable music player with a 20GB+ capacity that can play .ogg files. Suggestions anyone? Thanks.
I have no particular recommendations for specific brands of players; just a more general piece of advice:
You really need to make sure that the player itself is solid-state for improved shock resistance. Because, of course…
Anyone completing this MUST be banned.
I assume by .ogg files you are referring to the Ogg Vorbis lossy music format. (Ogg is actually a wrapper for a whole family of codecs collected under the Xiph.org aegis.) From the XiphWiki here is a list of hard drive music players; note that many will require third-party firmware installs to support Ogg Vorbis, and then with varying degrees of relliability. This isn’t overwhelmingly difficult for someone reasonably versed in Linux, but it’s also not something for a neophyte to cut teeth on.
The question that occurs to me is why you insist on playing Ogg Vorbis files. Did you receive the files in this format (which can’t be readily converted to MP3 or AAC/MP4 formats) or do you just want to support an open source codec? If the latter, I sympathize, but found it to be quite a pain to deal with playing them on other readers; in the case of my car stereo (which supports MP3), I couldn’t do it at all and finally gave up. Ogg Vorbis is a good format, giving significantly better playback quality at comperable rates of compression as compared to MP3, but not quite as good (to the limits of my own hearing) as AAC at the 128k bitrate. Beyond 128k (assuming no skipping or dropping) it is essentially indistinguishable from source, certainly from standard CD encoding.
Stranger
I don’t get it. Is it something about our deity “Og”’ or is it because the OP is a furious marmot, or something else?
I didn’t want to go into the whole nomenclature thing, but you are, of course, correct. I use ogg vorbis in part because it is open source but mostly because it sounds good to my tin ears. After much trial and error, I discovered that MP3 and WMA files, at any bitrate, sound awful to me. There is a sort of swishing underwatery kind of sound that drives me nuts, particularly with the drums/cymbals. Darned if I know what it is, but I can distinguish it immediately, even in a single-blind test.
OG SMASH!!!
Seems a lot of trouble to go to just so you can listen to “The Hedgehog Song” at your desk. 
I know that both Tentacle Monster and myself have a Neuros. IIRC, he didn’t have any major issues with his, but I had to send mine back twice. Mine works fine now and I love it. I have a 30 GB unit. It easily handles both MP3 and OGG formats.
It is an open source product so I have found a 3rd party piece of software that manages the file transfer better than the included software. Plus the Neuros has neat little features like ‘line-In’ for recording from a mic.
I would not recommend a Neuros for someone who is impatient or isn’t a little geeky and willing to spend some time learning how to use it.
I have an iRiver HP-120 which is a 20 GB player that supports a variety of formats including Ogg-Vorbis. It has a built-in FM tuner and a few other features. Best of all, it shows up as a USB drive and does not require any crapware. My device is a few years old, so current models should only get better than that.
The firmware on the HP-120 is fine. Installing the OSS Rockbox software was trivial and is heads and tails better than the default firmware.
I know what you’re referring to, but my ears aren’t golden and the swishing is inaudible to me at bitrates over 160kps. That said, I made the choice to support ogg-vorbis (and FLAC for lossless archiving) only partly for quality reasons, but mostly to support open-source software.
I’ve gone through multiple ogg-vorbis digital audio players and have been happy with all of them. I used a 512MB iRiver (forget the model no.) for quite a few years that I particularly liked because it used one AA battery and I never had to worry about running out of power.
I then used a 1G ipod nano with the rockbox firmware installed which allowed me to use ogg-vorbis with gapless playback. I love the power and flexibility of rockbox but it’s a big drain on battery power compared to Apple’s native ipod firmware.
Because of that, I’m going to upgrade to the Cowan iAudio X5 in the near future. I’ve had an opportunity to use one and I fell in love with it. That, coupled with excellent reviews have convinced me that this is the way to go.
BTW, if you’re interested in reading player reviews, dapreview is an excellent resource.