After that I had a Sandisk player which was _almost_ great, but let down by some terribly shoddy interface choices (the worst of which was that if it put itself into low power mode then it would forget where you were up to, meaning that when I came back to my player I'd find myself back at the start of the album. This is _unforgivable_). Oh, and when it's charging it can't also play music. Which is ridiculously dumb.
Anyway - I decided to give my Nokia N85 a go as an MP3 player. I could, at the least, use it as a backup when the Sansa was charging.
And it's great. It has the nicest possible interface for finding a track I want - text input. No more scrolling up and down until I hit the right track - just type "L", "E" and then I'm sitting on Lemon Jelly. It has volume controls on the side of the phone, and music controls on the other end from the keypad, if I just want quick access to play/pause/next/prev.
The only disadvantage it has so far is that it's only 8GB. And I can upgrade that to 16GB for £44.
Dunno why I didn't do this months ago.