More MP3 player noise

[johnridley]

It just won't sync reliably (actually, won't connect at all right now; I messed with it for an hour today, tried 3 different cables, different ports, and rebooted. It worked once then just died. I give up on it; it's just teasing me.

The Samsung I'm borrowing from my daughter is OK but the battery life is down to about 4 or 5 hours.

At this point I'm thinking the Sandisk Fuze. I was looking at a Sandisk Clip but at a 10 hour battery life it's marginal (also there are reports that some units drain batteries while off; a hardware issue apparently, probably fixed on newer models but still, most players don't actually last as long as they're rated for). The Fuze has a 24 hour rated battery life per charge, has a Micro SDHC so you can expand the memory up to 20 GB or more with cards, and the word online is that its a "nearly perfect" audiobook player; it actually recognizes audiobooks as a separate genre and keeps them separate from music, and Sandisk is actively fixing annoyances reported to them by the audiobook community, and they're releasing firmware updates regularly.

It also supports photos and video, is smaller than a credit card, and about as thick as a pencil. There are third party skins for it too and it mounts as a standard mass storage device and charges with a standard USB connector. Standard is good. The Micro SDHC slot also is very nice; not only can I expand it, but I could even have a library of different kinds of music on different cards for very cheap (I just bought a few 2GB cards for $5.99 each).

At $85 for the 4GB unit it's more than I'd planned to spend, but I do have a $50 Amazon credit right now... Also, it's probably about time I stopped screwing around burning through $15 players every few months and got something a little nicer.

Comments

[whl.livejournal.com]

If I were getting a Fuze, I figured that I'd get the 2 GB model, and put a 4, 6, or 8 GB microSDhc in it.

For daily use, my 1 GB Shuffle usually suffices, and I've even made the 11 hour trip from here back to Chicago using it, thanks to the fact that spoken word compresses well.

2 GB would be big, and I have enough microSD cards around to cover the cases where it isn't big enough.

But that is just my usage.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

I just got a new 4G for $63 ($70 shipped) on eBay, which is a few bucks less than the 2GB model goes for on Amazon. Happily I had some money in my Paypal account from selling some old astronomy books last month.

For audiobooks, even 1G is plenty. But when I want music, even 30GB isn't enough, but I figure a 4G unit, maybe with an extra card in it, should keep me happy. I only this month got my first Micro SD card, I never had anything that needed them before (using them on the Nintendo DS now)

In general you're right, a 2G would be plenty. I'd probably spring for the 4G even if buying new since the incremental price is only $12. For most other players they're charging more like $30 to jump from 2 to 4, and that's crazy.

I've never gotten an Apple product since they never have FM radios (except as an add-on) and that's mandatory for me. The Clip would have been good enough but the Fuze's 24 hour battery life was a huge consideration, and the SDHC expansion slot was the clincher.

The indexed spin wheel seems interesting. It looks easier to control than the Apple ring, which I always wind up overshooting with. It'll be interesting to see if I can get this thing to last a few years.

Now I need to find a really good way to keep it bone dry in the rain (or in the sweat as it hangs on my neck or on my arm).

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

The one problem I see with the Fuze is that there's no way to contain it without buying accessories. You have to put it in a pocket or hold it. It has no lanyard hole that I can see. So I had to go up to ebay and buy an accessory kit, but that wasn't bad; $13 for a silicone case, arm band, lanyard, AC and DC chargers and a spare sync cable (can use an extra one at work so I can leech power there).

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Another possible problem: I've seen comments that indicate that the player does a rather time-consuming rescan of all files on the expansion card on every boot; it doesn't keep track of if the card has been removed or not. If having a few hundred or thousand songs on an expansion card means the thing takes a minute or more to boot up, that makes the expansion slot much less desirable.

I'll find out in a few days when I get it.

The Sony eBook reader does the long, long bootup to scan the expansion card too, but only if you remove and insert a card (even if it's the same one) - it can tell if the card was removed or not, even when it was off.

[whl.livejournal.com]

All the comments I read about whether or not the Fuze supported "bookmarking", vital to listening to long radio shows, were before the units actually shipped, which was when I stopped researching, to be fair.

I'm curious to hear whether it keeps track of playback position in multiple tracks, or just resumes at the last played point on the latest track. Or possibly doesn't even do that.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Apparently it auto-bookmarks each track when you exit, and when you go to play a previously-played track, it asks if you want to start from the beginning or the bookmark.
Early on it lost all bookmarks when it built its library files after syncing, but a recent firmware update fixed that.