ianandoana.com

So far so good!

I got through a couple more audio books on the trip and went through two batteries and the player hasn’t frozen!! In addition to it not freezing, Sandisk has made some feature improvements to the player, most notably the fast forwarding – it is now exponential, a change that made me quite happy.

There are still some bugs in the player.

Position Loss

The player lost my position in my books multiple times. I was at about 2.5 hours through an mp3 segment and I paused and powered off the player. When I powered the player back up it had lost my position. In order to determine if this was a fluke, I fast-forwarded to the same position and paused and powered off the player and powered it back on. It again had lost my position.

I decided that I’d avoid powering it off as despite the improvement in fast forwarding it is still a pain. Fortunately, the player provides another way to power off: if you pause and wait 20 seconds, the player will autopower off. Again I fast forwarded to the postion, paused and this time let the player power off itself; powering back up the player remembered the position, finally!

Ignoring play button

Another bug I encountered was that in certain cases the player would refuse to play. The play icon would appear in the display but the counter would not increase and no sound would come from the unit. Pressing the play button again would change the icon to pause, still no sound, pressing again would change to play and still no sound. The solution seemed to require fast forwarding to the next track and then rewinding and would sometimes require powering off in addition.

Chirping

Finally one audio book that I played was divided up into really small segments and for some reason the player would chirp after each piece was played. I think this artifact is similar to pausing: when you pause the player cuts out and emits a sound. If you pause in the middle of a track in iTunes the correct thing happens and you don’t notice an audio artifact.

They did update the firmware to 4.1.08, a minor point release, when I got back and plugged the player in. Hopefully that update will have corrected these issues but I doubt it. The chirping seems to have been reduced but there is a noticeable click after each segment (playing those same segments one after another in winamp causes no noticeable artifact).

The chirping is probably the most annoying thing about the player. If I used it for music then there would be many other annoying things – no folder structure for one. It is encouraging that they continue to update the firmware. Hopefully one day they will have something approaching the quality of the ipod firmware or maybe Apple will release a player that takes AAA batteries, at which point I’ll buy it.

Technorati Tags: Sandisk, Sansa, MP3 player