Aside from the reasons listed, not all mp3 players even play formats like FLAC in the first place. Also, even as a generic term -- unless they're iPods, they're

Aside from the reasons listed, not all mp3 players even play formats like FLAC in the first place. Also, even as a generic term -- unless they're iPods, they're "MP3 players", so they're probably going to be closely associated with MP3 files until something radically different comes along. It took me a bit to find a player I liked that could play ogg vorbis. (It was an iAudio U2 flash drive, several years ago.) Granted, there are also Apple and Microsoft lossless codecs, but file format fragmentation is part of the problem here. Also, not all music even benefits from the careful encoding that could benefit, say, Beethoven. One of my favorite bands, The Mountain Goats, has recorded about half of their numerous releases on an old Panasonic boombox. Also, some studio music is produced so poorly that a lossless copy off CD wouldn't help much (http://www.mindspring.com/~mrichter/dynamics/dynamics.htm http://www.mindspring.com/~mrichter/dynamics/dynamics.htm).