Sansa Fuze impressions
Aug. 1st, 2008 10:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
johnridleyI picked up a Sansa Fuze MP3 player - thanks to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
whl for pointing me at it. My previous couple of cheapo players where some of the lesser Sandisc units - a 512M and a 1G, and they worked OK but eventually died (the 2nd at least due to water during a rainstorm). I hadn't intended to spend more than $30 or $40 on a replacement, but this drew me in, and I had some $$ from selling some astronomy books that paid for a chunk of it anyway.
It's working very well in general. The resume and auto-bookmarking are pretty good for audiobooks. It does remember the location of the file it was playing when you exited. Unfortunately it doesn't remember WHICH file it was playing - so if you're on track 40 out of 100 for the book, you need to remember that. Once you select track 40 and hit play, it says "Resume or start at beginning?" - so I guess that's a clue that you found the right track, and you don't have to fast forward to 8 minutes into the track to find exactly the right spot. In general I don't have much trouble remembering which track number I was on this morning (assuming I remember to look) so it's not a huge deal for me, but it could be a little better.
It's not the right choice for video. It works OK but you MUST use their conversion program, which is Windows-only and somewhat unstable, to convert the videos. They're supposedly AVI/MP4 files, but nobody's been able to make ffmpeg or anything else make an AVI that it'll accept. No biggie anyway, except for a few rare instances, I only use the video functions to encode short, 45 second TaeKwonDo training videos (to help me remember my forms) and I did all I'll need for the next 6 months in 3 minutes. I suppose I got spoiled by the Zen Vision:M which would just take any old DivX/XviD file just dropped on it and play it. But at 1.9" the screen wouldn't be ideal for watching movies on anyway. Nice for catching up on TV shows during trips, though.
The micro-SDHC slot promises eventual expandability to 32G as bigger cards become available (biggest is now 12G with 16G on the horizon). Unfortunately the internal and external memory appear to the sync'ing computer as two separate drives/devices, but as a programmer I honestly don't know how else they would do it unless they forbid you from ever taking the card out once it was synced, so this is to be expected really. Once unplugged from the computer, the device folds all media together regardless of where it's stored so that's transparent.
As far as functionality goes, I agree with most reviewers that say it's at least the equal of the iPod nano. Navigation is fast and crisp, the wheel is at least as good as the iPod wheel, and the menus respond instantly.
I grabbed a copy of MediaMonkey. I had some stability problems with it last time I tried it and gave up. The 3.x version that's out now seems excellent. I haven't found anything I want to do with my audio collection that it doesn't do. It syncs seamlessly with the Fuze in MTP mode, and it auto-downloads podcasts - this is nice, I had been using Juice and had to manually drag/drop my podcasts. WGBH has an excellent classical music podcast, which unfortunately I caught up with in my first two days with the device.
The FM radio is MUCH better than any I've previously had in an MP3 player. My experience with others has been bad - they normally get VERY poor reception - in the Ann Arbor area all I could get was WUOM public radio - not a huge problem for me since that's all I wanted to listen to anyway, but still... This one gets a dozen or so stations, including a Lansing NPR station that does classical (WUOM does news/talk).
Battery life is extremely good - I listened to it all day at work yesterday, and for a couple of hours at home, then another 3 hours or so this morning so far, and the battery gauge shows about 75% full.
The sound quality seems pretty good, though the best phones I have are the $20 Sony closed cans at work. I have a set of Koss PortaPros coming to replace those; the review sites rate them marginally better than the Sennheiser PX100, and they were a few bucks cheaper. I kind of like the idea that Koss released the PortaPro in 1984 and hasn't changed a thing since then, and even so it's consistently reviewed as the best < $50 headphones around.
I paid $64 for a new 4G unit on eBay; they're something like $84 on Amazon. $13 to another eBay vendor bought a transparent silicon skin that fits perfectly, an armband and belt clip, an extra sync cable and an AC and a DC (car) charger, both of which just provide 5V to a USB connector, so they're very useful for other things too.
whl for pointing me at it. My previous couple of cheapo players where some of the lesser Sandisc units - a 512M and a 1G, and they worked OK but eventually died (the 2nd at least due to water during a rainstorm). I hadn't intended to spend more than $30 or $40 on a replacement, but this drew me in, and I had some $$ from selling some astronomy books that paid for a chunk of it anyway.It's working very well in general. The resume and auto-bookmarking are pretty good for audiobooks. It does remember the location of the file it was playing when you exited. Unfortunately it doesn't remember WHICH file it was playing - so if you're on track 40 out of 100 for the book, you need to remember that. Once you select track 40 and hit play, it says "Resume or start at beginning?" - so I guess that's a clue that you found the right track, and you don't have to fast forward to 8 minutes into the track to find exactly the right spot. In general I don't have much trouble remembering which track number I was on this morning (assuming I remember to look) so it's not a huge deal for me, but it could be a little better.
It's not the right choice for video. It works OK but you MUST use their conversion program, which is Windows-only and somewhat unstable, to convert the videos. They're supposedly AVI/MP4 files, but nobody's been able to make ffmpeg or anything else make an AVI that it'll accept. No biggie anyway, except for a few rare instances, I only use the video functions to encode short, 45 second TaeKwonDo training videos (to help me remember my forms) and I did all I'll need for the next 6 months in 3 minutes. I suppose I got spoiled by the Zen Vision:M which would just take any old DivX/XviD file just dropped on it and play it. But at 1.9" the screen wouldn't be ideal for watching movies on anyway. Nice for catching up on TV shows during trips, though.
The micro-SDHC slot promises eventual expandability to 32G as bigger cards become available (biggest is now 12G with 16G on the horizon). Unfortunately the internal and external memory appear to the sync'ing computer as two separate drives/devices, but as a programmer I honestly don't know how else they would do it unless they forbid you from ever taking the card out once it was synced, so this is to be expected really. Once unplugged from the computer, the device folds all media together regardless of where it's stored so that's transparent.
As far as functionality goes, I agree with most reviewers that say it's at least the equal of the iPod nano. Navigation is fast and crisp, the wheel is at least as good as the iPod wheel, and the menus respond instantly.
I grabbed a copy of MediaMonkey. I had some stability problems with it last time I tried it and gave up. The 3.x version that's out now seems excellent. I haven't found anything I want to do with my audio collection that it doesn't do. It syncs seamlessly with the Fuze in MTP mode, and it auto-downloads podcasts - this is nice, I had been using Juice and had to manually drag/drop my podcasts. WGBH has an excellent classical music podcast, which unfortunately I caught up with in my first two days with the device.
The FM radio is MUCH better than any I've previously had in an MP3 player. My experience with others has been bad - they normally get VERY poor reception - in the Ann Arbor area all I could get was WUOM public radio - not a huge problem for me since that's all I wanted to listen to anyway, but still... This one gets a dozen or so stations, including a Lansing NPR station that does classical (WUOM does news/talk).
Battery life is extremely good - I listened to it all day at work yesterday, and for a couple of hours at home, then another 3 hours or so this morning so far, and the battery gauge shows about 75% full.
The sound quality seems pretty good, though the best phones I have are the $20 Sony closed cans at work. I have a set of Koss PortaPros coming to replace those; the review sites rate them marginally better than the Sennheiser PX100, and they were a few bucks cheaper. I kind of like the idea that Koss released the PortaPro in 1984 and hasn't changed a thing since then, and even so it's consistently reviewed as the best < $50 headphones around.
I paid $64 for a new 4G unit on eBay; they're something like $84 on Amazon. $13 to another eBay vendor bought a transparent silicon skin that fits perfectly, an armband and belt clip, an extra sync cable and an AC and a DC (car) charger, both of which just provide 5V to a USB connector, so they're very useful for other things too.
