The most annoying

If you manually power off, more often then not the player will turn back on demented. It will refuse to play, it will change the icon from pause to play but nothing will be heard. The most relieble way to get it back to an undemented state is to have it in play mode and rewind to the previous track, pause and then manual power off and power it back on. This will normally bring the player back to a useable state. In order to avoid demented play mode you should never manually power off the player and instead rely on the auto power off feature. Good news is that it never lost my spot though that might have been because I was still being careful not to manually power off the player.

Lesser sins

This was the first time I had filled the full 2 gigs of the player with tracks. After you load the files onto the player and detach it from your computer, the player rebuilds its database. Rebuilding of the database with 2gigs of files takes about 3.5 minutes – not too quick – even if you don’t make changes to any of the content any time you remove it from your computer expect it to take 3.5 minutes.

With 2 gigs of audio book files on my player there were over 1000 files. I had 3 audio books loaded and the book i wanted to listen to started at track 120. In order to get to track 120 I had to forward through 120 tracks – you’d think this would be a pretty easy thing to do. Each forward though a track takes 8 seconds, so I had to click the forward button 120 times waiting 8 seconds between each click. This turns out to be a 16 minute affair – ouch – good thing the book I wanted wasn’t at track 500!!

The price has dropped quick a bit since I bought it. I debated sticking to the 1gig player since the 2gig seemed a little more expensive than it should have been but I ended up getting it. I paid 42.99 pounds and two months later the price is 29.99 pounds – oh well hopefully I can stand this player till a better one comes out and reaches my price range. I think I’ll wait til a player comes out that is about the same physical size, takes AA batteries that give the player longer play time, and is 20-30 gig in size, oh and hopefully has decent firmware – though clearly I can live with substandard firmware as I still think this is the player that bets fits my needs.

If you like Sudoku, you might like Kakuro, Masyu or Nurikabe – you can try them out on the NY Times website right now, or search for one of the dozens of free sites on the Internet.  So far, I’ve found Kakuro the hardest one, but they each take a bit of work to get used to.
*We haven’t left Edinburgh in almost 4 weeks, so we’ve got no exciting travel reports to share.  We’re off to Greece (Corfu/Athens/Crete/Santorini) soon though!

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