The Trekstor Vibez works the way you describe (as do Carbon and Forge, for that matter). If I had to choose between a player with a database, and a player with mass-storage class ("drive-letter") support, that'd be a really difficult decision. But it's a false dichotomy: I'd rather choose a player with both. Or rather, all three: having a database on the player allows useful advanced UI features; having a database in the PC software allows useful advanced sync features; and having mass-storage support (or, via Ethernet, FTP) as the mediation between those two databases allows other useful stuff such as non-music-file support and zero-PC-footprint music adding or deleting (in Internet cafes, for instance).

Some other MP3 players have a halfway-house solution, where dragged-and-dropped music is accessible through a Folders menu, but doesn't get folded-in to the soup menus except by the PC-side software. Iriver players used to work like that, and we considered it for Sapphire as a fall-back solution if we couldn't get the real thing working in time. (Eventually the database turned out to not be among Sapphire's biggest problems.)

Quite frankly, it's a royal pain that the car-player isn't drag-and-drop. But the Trekstor Vibez self-databasing code is a lot more complex and was a lot more work than what went into the car-player. (And writing our own USB mass-storage target, when we came to do it, was no fun at all. But if anyone were making the Empeg these days, Linux 2.6 has one built-in.)

Peter