Not to be a fly in the ointment, but if/when hierarchical playlists get implemented, the developers are going to have to be very careful to make them “invisible” to users who don’t want to use them. Hierarchies are not intuitive to everyone, and the common person who doesn’t want all of the bells and whistles might get confused if they’re forced to deal with nested playlists. Working helpdesk I run into users every day who just don’t “get” the concept of a directory structure. The best they can do is understand, “I’m going to copy this file to my C drive”, and even that is pushing my luck at times.

This shouldn’t be a barrier to implementing hierarchical playlists, just a consideration. As long as you can do them or not, the functionality should be transparent to most users. My wife probably wouldn’t care if they’re there are not, but like others here I’d really struggle without them. The empeg was my first mp3 player; trying to use something more “flattened” out (like my PC based players) just drives me nuts.

I’m saving for a Karma now and hope to be able to get one in the next six months. I really hope the hierarchical playlists are there, because that will probably be the thing that pushes me over the edge when I finally have the $$$.