MP3 CD players like that don’t/didn’t get enough love. So
much capacity for next to no cost and the units I had were robust to disc abuse which surprised me.
Yeah, I was always impressed at how resilient those cheap MP3 CD-Rs were in practice. And compared to old-school DiscMans with "20 second skip protection", it was very cool that it could just buffer the entire track in memory, make bumpy roads a non-issue. IIRC it was smart enough to do that well before the track began, so it instantly started playing when you skipped forward.