Need an Ipod Replacement - anyone used a Sansa Clip+

[Robin_J]

My 2007 Ipod Classic seems to have broken - it's limping along after a bunch of restores, repairs etc. I'm looking for something to replace it - something with at least 20GB storage which will talk to Banshee.

I've looked at the Sandisk Sansa Clip+ player which uses a micro SD card to have 8GB capacity + 16GB SD card, but I worry that it will be a bit slow to find music in a large collection and possibly a bit unreliable - I've known cards like that get really hot. I'd also rather not have the music collection sorted by whether it's on the internal memory or the card.

Does anyone have any experience using a Sansa Clip+ player with SD card, or can suggest anything like an Ipod classic, but cheaper? I'm loathe to pay for a 16 or 32GB ipod nano since firstly, I've heard bad things about reliability, and secondly they cost almost as much as 160gb classic - if I'm going to pay upwards of £100 I might as well get a new classic.

[xenopeek]

I just got a Sansa Clip+; I chose it for being one of the few players clearly compatibility with Linux (presents itself just as USB storage device, and plays Ogg Vorbis and FLAC). I don't use the SD card slot though. But anyway, it gets detected and it works perfectly with Rhythmbox. Should work fine with Banshee as well. If needed you can change the USB mode from the player itself, switching between it showing up as a storage device or as a music player.

If you organize your music smartly, it should be manageable I think. It shows just 4 lines of text on the screen, so this is not an iPod Touch Ways that you can select music to play: Play All, Recently Added, Artists, Albums, Songs, Genres, My Top Rated, Playlists, Folders.

[Robin_J]

Excellent, thanks for the information. I'm not looking for an ipod touch either - I don't know why I would want my mp3 player to also do a whole load of other pointless tasks badly. Anyway, thanks a lot, it sounds promising but I'd need to use an SD card with one because of the size of my collection, and I worry about the reliability, music organisation and battery life associated with so doing. I would really rather not buy another ipod for so many reasons.

Edit - turns out the Clip+ doesn't play aac files. This will be a problem as most of my music collection is .m4a and re-encoding isn't a viable option.

Second edit - would a Clip+ play m4a if one were to run Rockbox on it?

[pluraldave]

I've got one and wouldn't recommend it. It's cheap because it's poor quality. The clip broke off within days and keeping it in my pocket caused the headphone socket to become loose. As a result sound was intermittent at best and the player became unuseable.

These days I just use my Android phone if I want to listen to music and it's better in every regard.

[Monsta]

That's sad to hear... I was almost going to buy this Clip+ because of (as people say) its awesome sound quality (I've got an excellent player called Cowon iAUDIO U3 so I have something to compare with), but it's not the first time I heard that Clip+'s manufacturing quality is really cheap.

The main reason I was going to buy it is that my faithful U3 is almost 6 years old and its battery might very well die this year...

[Robin_J]

Due to getting irritated with not having an ipod, I went out today and bought a 16GB Creative Zen X-fi3, on the basis that it can be expanded with a micro SD card, plays aac/m4a files and has some nice features, notably an FM radio and drag-and-drop functionality when connecting to a computer.

I absolutely hate it. It's slow to boot up and to use, the headphone jack is too tight and has pulled the jack out of some Sennheiser earbuds (superglue should fix it, no major damage but still incredibly frustrating), it orders my music in a stupid way (I have a lot of old jazz cd compilations with 100+ tracks apiece and usually a different artist for each track, and it insists on arranging them by artist, giving me a huge artists list. I've had to wipe all the artist metadata and replace it with "various artists" which is a bit of a shame), it feels quite cheap and the screen feels like plastic so is likely to scratch.

[Monsta]

it orders my music in a stupid way (I have a lot of old jazz cd compilations with 100+ tracks apiece and usually a different artist for each track, and it insists on arranging them by artist, giving me a huge artists list. I've had to wipe all the artist metadata and replace it with "various artists" which is a bit of a shame)

Haha, I recall I've seen the same behavior on my friend's iPhone when we copied a compilation album to it. I guess it's the other side of the coin of using only tags for song arrangement while totally ignoring the folders.

[nobeernotv]

Hello all,

I am trying to use my sansa clip, firmware v02.01.32A with an Asus U47VC-ds51 laptop which I just installed Maya on. The clip is set to MSC. But when I plug it in, though the CLip's screen shows "Connected", it does not show up on the desktop or in the "Computer" window.

ANyone have any ideas how I can get these to play nice with eachother?

Thanks,
Steve

[xenopeek]

It would be visible in your music player, so open that.

[nobeernotv]

Hmmm...opened banshee and still not seeing any sign of the player.

[matarbell]

I've been using a Sansa Clip+ for just over a year now, mostly for Audiobooks, but also for my music collection. It does not distinguish between content loaded on the internal memory versus content on the micro SD card, it only looks at the tags, so it doesn't matter where you load stuff. I don't use any auto sync features, but prefer to manage its content manually, using a file manager and drag and drop, or copy and paste. I keep it in Mass Storage mode, so I can use either Linux or Windows to access. It is detected by Banshee, and can be managed from the Banshee UI. Haven't tried any other applications. I find the sound quality to be very good, comparable to my girlfriends iPod Classic, assuming that you have good headphones, or are connected to a quality audio system. Playlists are rather specific though. All the songs in a playlist must be in the same file folder as the playlist itself, which I find quite annoying. You either have to put all of your music in one folder, or have duplicates in each playlist folder. Since I like to keep all my music in Artist/Album/ folders, using playlists is a real pain. It manages all content by tags, with no regard to folder location, with the exception of the playlist quirk. Does a nice job with audiobooks, keeping track of where you left off for each book, and resumes correctly on next startup, but it is important that you have your audiobook files properly tagged with genre (Audiobook) and track number, or they may not play in the correct sequence. As for the construction quality, yes it's relatively cheap, but it only costs $35. Mine has survived numerous drops, but it's small size, light weight and thick plastic case make for a light landing each time. I haven't had any problems, but figure if it last more than a year (which it has) and I do have a problem, I'll just get another one and swap the micro SD card over to the new one.

[Monsta]

Playlists are rather specific though. All the songs in a playlist must be in the same file folder as the playlist itself, which I find quite annoying. You either have to put all of your music in one folder, or have duplicates in each playlist folder. Since I like to keep all my music in Artist/Album/ folders, using playlists is a real pain.

That's inconvenient indeed. There's a Rockbox port available though (here's some info on its playlists). The downside is that there's a risk of bricking the device during Rockbox installation. I know, that's somewhat radical solution.