Tuesday, November 10. 2009Sansa Clip (or: How I learned to love Skullcandy Chops) So, long story short, or maybe long, we'll see after I've finished writing this: I had been looking for a new portable music player for a while. My old one was crappy, to say the least. Incidentally I had talked about this on IRC, and fellow KDE developer Will Stephenson said he was also on the look for a new player. So we googled a bit. I had some special wishes for my "ideal" device, and Will eventually found one that exactly fitted my needs. What I needed was this: As it turned out, the Sansa Clip is exactly the device I had dreamed of. Impatient as I (notoriously) am, I had to head out instantly and buy the thing (4GB version costs about 60 USD). Loaded some music on it, went on a jogging tour today, and what can I say: The thing rocks  I'm a happy camper now. The Clip worked out of the box, the original firmware from Sandisk supports all formats I need (including OGG and FLAC), so I didn't even have to upgrade it (or install Rockbox).Additionally, I bought these sweet headphones, cause the bundled ones didn't really cut it for sports. They have a fancy name, "Skullcandy Chops", and their sound quality is fancy too. Also ideal for sports, as they are not classical earbuds, but instead they are worn close to the ear, which I like. With standard earbuds the things tend to fall out of my ears, apparently I have weird ears or something.  Disclaimer: I do not work for Sandisk, nor do I work for Skullcandy. They did promise me a "really cool holiday" though for making some promotion. We'll see about that. Trackbacks
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Seems like a lovely device, so I'll keep that on my radar for when my six (or eight?) year old iRiver H120 dies.
But not enough space for a proper FLAC collection 
You can also get a 8GB version.
Then there is the new Clip+, which has a MicroSD port. Maybe more suitable for you?
Yeah, the Sansa players are really awesome devices.
Especially in combination with Rockbox  Personally I own a Sansa E 200 (v1) and imho it is the perfect audio player, way better than any ipod.
Does the Battery live long, when playing OGG files?
Two years ago I bought a Samsung YP-U2, because of it's OGG support. But I was really pissed, when I found out that the battey was empty after about 1 hour, when playing OGG files all the time.
Sandisk itself claims 15 hours battery life. From what I've read on forums, it's about 13 hours realistically.
I haven't been able to verify this yet, but >10 hours sounds good enough to me.
What about battery life? My current music player has quite poor battery life...
I bought the 2GB version this past winter (February, I think), and I love it! I saw online that it supported OGG, but the packaging for it mentioned nothing of the sort. Imagine my surprise when it played OGG and FLAC perfectly.
These things are great little devices. Small, cheap, easy to use, support multiple formats, can withstand rain and snow. I listened to eight hours worth of podcasts on mine one day and still had plenty of battery left. Can't beat it!
I have the Sansa Fuse with all of the above with these extra points:
1. Firmware update. Drop a file into the root of the drive (as a disk, you don't need windows to do it) and it'll update on boot. 2. MicroSD. MicroSD's are brilliant, I have an 8GB Model, and an 8GB MicroSD. Them FLAC collections aren't far away 
As others have noted there is a new Clip+ that supports up to 32GB microsd on top of the internal memory (up to 8GB).
Another surprising thing is the superb quality of the audio output itself as shown in this review of audiophile mp3 players: http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-12519_7-9968448-49.html I owned an original clip, and I recently upgraded to a 8GB clip+ with a pair of 16GB microsd cards. This is by far the best portable audio player I've ever seen. The only down side (and it's not much compared to all the awesomness) is the lack of aac and alac support. My clip+ also drains its battery significantly faster when playing ogg and flac.
I bought that exact player for my wife last year for Christmas. I never really tried it in Amarok (which is my music player) because I kinda prefer manual file management. But if this works werll in Amarok i need to test it out!
Does Amarok work to add playlists for this? Our other option is the not-so-easy app, easyTAG with these instructions: http://forums.sandisk.com/sansa/board/message?board.id=clip&thread.id=4410
The Sansa players will enumerate as MTP or MSC devices so you can do manual file management if you wanted. It even has sort by folders now
"Rugged and water proof."
Did you test that? I cant't find any of that in the manual (at least a search for "water" did not give any result) http://www.sandisk.com/media/53255/clip-usermanual.pdf
I wouldn't take the device into the swimming pool.
As for jogging in rain, it sure seems rugged enough.
"Usable with Amarok. What Amarok does really well is MTP, so I wanted that."
I disagree: http://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=116&t=82731&p=132306&hilit=mtp#p132306 Hopefully someone will fix this soon. sigh
It's certainly better than the UMS device support, which is hardcoded mp3-only at the moment.
@Mark, @Michael: 32 GB MicroSD? Why, I never knew...
My six billion year old iRiver has a 20 GB 2.5" HD in it. If those 32 GB MicroSDs cost less than "very much", I might finally have found my new audio player Thanks, because I thought I wouldn't find something that can replace the iRiver. The iRiver has optical digital audio out, which is good for hooking up to the amp at home, but I have an ancient NAD amp that you can still fix yourself with a soldering iron and a bunch of parts from the electronics store, so no optical in anyhow We'll start selling those Sansas ASAP at Lincomp, too.
There is one really good site on the web for checking out new portable media players that are not a product of Apple's, called anythingbutipod.com . I discovered it about a year ago and since then based most of my portable media player decisions on reviews from that site and never regretted it. Right now, they are doing a series of reviewing media players for PCs, but unfortunately they seem to have missed Amarok
Perhaps because it mainly supports Linux and the Windows support is still rather bumpy.
Thanks for the info.
Anyway, maybe write them and tell them about Amarok? Perhaps it was simply not yet on their radar
I did write them as part of the first comment on their article about another media player: http://www.anythingbutipod.com/archives/2009/11/j-river-media-jukebox-12-review.php#comment-432753
Well, I think I will try out the Contact-function of this site, maybe there will be some response then
Sadly MTP-support on Linux breaks quite often in different apps, at least for me. It might be my Creative Zen DAP, and for everybody's sake I hope it is. mtpfs doesn't really work too well either.. I guess I'm a bit depressed about the Zen and MTP.
(Also, when will Amarok get support for transferring podcasts to a portable player? This annoys me to no end, and forces me to keep Banshee even on KDE)
I'm currently in the process of debugging some MTP related issues. Especially ZEN users seem to have issues, but I can't tell if they come from LibMTP, or Amarok, or from the ZEN itself. With the Sansa I can't reproduce most of the problems.
Any detailed information from ZEN users would be helpful
what about an Cowon iAudio7? plays many formats, works well with Amarok, battery life ->50hours, flashbased
Hmm. For me, Amarok 2.2.2beta (==2.2.1.90) on Kubuntu 9.10 does not see my Clip+ in MTP mode. I've got libmtp 1.0.1, and everything else is fairly recent. I tried MSC mode, and it seems to work ok with amarok, but I didn't really give it much of a stress test.
Does anyone have the Clip+ working in MTP with Amarok? Any hints? -gary
I have heard great thing about sansa, what i'm worried about, is there any service centers near each city in the united states?
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