Might've been an S1, which arguably was better than Apple's products in many ways, and likely sold a lot more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S1_MP3_player
From the Wikipedia page:
This product is what is referred to as a 'common mold' which means many different suppliers can produce this same model. The manufacturers are almost exclusively located in China.
Primarily defined by the use of a system-on-a-chip of one of the Actions brands and some common core features, S1 products vary widely in software and hardware as well as design.
I counted 62 different manufacturers listed in the Wikipedia article that apparently licensed this reference design (the core features and basic hardware), and who then made variations to the user interface or added a feature or two, and slapped their names onto it.
There seems to have been a whole industry of MP3 Players that were essentially identical at the core electronics level in the early 2000s, and we never realized it.
I remember getting a Creative Zen a few years later, and it was the first time when I realized how everything turns into crap with the technology advancement. No batteries, so needed USB charger to travel (USB chargers weren't even too popular back then). No mass storage support, only sync through Windows-only software, MTP was unusable on Linux, didn't work with cars or boomboxes. Video playback required converting to very specific formats, which the provided software often failed to do, needed custom codec packs. Absolutely required MP3 ID tags to even show the song in the playlist. Cool idea for a player, but the software was pure garbage. I think I broke it once and used the old player for years more.
I started with a 32 MB Diamond Rio PMP300, so cramped as I transcoded music to 64kbps just to cram an hour in there, but the ability to listen to music without it _ever_ skipping (I was MTBing in the summer and snowboarding in the winter) was invaluable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_PMP300
And then upgraded to a 64MB Rio 600
https://tweakers.net/ext/i/964783073.jpg
After that it was straight up to a 4GB black iPod Nano gen 1 that I rocked for a loooooong time as it was insanely hardened and durable.
My first mp3 player was a 20GB archos xs202, which I loved. Partly for being a great music player, partly for being a generic 20GB external drive when needed. I think at one point I had it set up both as a music player and to boot debian on a host PC when connected via USB...
I remember thinking that people using iTunes to manage their music were complete idiots when you could simply drag and drop MP3 files into the drive. I still think that, to be honest.
