I tried to use N800 as an audio player when Canola came out. I abandoned the idea for now and switched back to my old Samsung Yepp, mainly because software (built in Media Player, Canola, mplayer, Ogg Player) is just not good for this. The first two are built around the idea of a media library automatically built from media discovered on your memory cards. Unfortunately this is limiting to the point of being unusable: audio files I collected over the years are in different formats (mp3s, oggs, even mp2s and wavs) and very few of them are properly tagged. All of them, however, are well organized in folders and files have useful names. So all I need is to say play all from this folder, and there is no player on N800 (as far as I know) that would do that. Ogg Player is very limited in many respects. MPlayer is almost does it for me, even though using it from command line on N800 is rather painful, but unfortunately it resets the volume to default value for each song it plays, and that kills it as an audio player.

Also, the process of crawling the file system to build media library (done both by Media Player and Canola, I believe) is quite intrusive - takes up CPU and sometimes prevents mounting of memory cards when connecting the device via USB. This is just annoying...

Quality of N800's sound is not bad though. All we need is right software...