For my purposes, this player has worked out very well. I had a more expensive MP3 player, but I dropped it and lost one of the channels, so this seemed to be a good replacement. It has a good speaker and will play at a high enough volume to overcome other ambient noise, and the sound quality through the speaker is good (there is a slight amount of hiss through the headphones). I download my podcasts onto USB or SD card, so it works well for that. It plays off of 3xD cells, and will recharge them...