What File System For Portable MP3 Player?

Komi asks: "I am a senior EE student at Purdue, and in my design class we're making an mp3 player that can read from a hard disk. We're using an 8-bit microcontroller (Rabbit 2000), and I've read documentation on how to interface it with a 16-bit IDE interface (where you latch the upper bits and get those on the next cycle). So actually doing reads and writes shouldn't be a problem. My question is what file system should I use? I want to be able to copy the songs to the hard drive from a PC, then attach the drive to my player and have the player read it. I've read that the FAT system is a horror to use on a small micro, so I was wondering if I should use ext2 ^[?] or ext3 ^[?] . Or should I just stick to reading from CD's?"