Thursday 8 April 2010

Sansa Personal Music Player



















Coming soon is a new personal music player to better integrate with my PC audio needs and increased buying of Downloaded albums.
The history of this integration is a painful one involving buying several years ago a Sony Hi-MD recorder that was meant to enable easy file transfer from cd and downloaded Mp3's but was let down by rubbishy bug ridden software and its inability when connected up to transfer using the original stereo Mindisc standard for compatibility with my home deck with the advantage of automatic track naming which as an R.S.I. survivor would of been a godsend.
Said machine sits gathering dust most days as its own control interface is one of worst ergonomically of any recorder of any type I've ever owned and I struggle to use it with my condition.
Instead I use my Sharp MD portable which sounds really good to play discs recorded on the home deck (a Sony MDS JB940QS) in Stereo (or mono mode) for the best sound quality but to transfer program from PC I need to burn off the content as an audio cd and copy that in real time and then title it up by hand.
I love the format and don't mind a bit of titling but sometimes it would be easier to just transfer the file over to a player and listen to that and with Minidisc generally speaking it's one disc to take out with you for each album you might fancy listening to.
That's where this upcoming Sensa Clip+ player is meant to slot in as it handles Mp3, Wma (Windoze own format), The Open Source Ogg Vorbis as well as the lossless codec Flac which gives full cd quality native. It doesn't do Apples AAC but as I don't use iTunes and its store that's no loss plus with dbPoweramp's batch converter I can convert to Mp3 if someone got me a file in that form.
What it does have going for it is the capacity about 7.36GB after it's file management has taken a bite (or is that byte!) plus the ability to add an extra micro SD type card (up to 16GB) to expand it or slot in a selection of albums ready done for a low price.
If you buy one and for what Amazon are charging it could be just the thing for you I would visit the Sandisk website and download the full manual in American English as the instructions supplied with the player are a bit skimpy.
When you connect it to your computer using a USB to mini USB lead you'll see it as an external device via the usual interface - in Windows 'My Computer'.
Clicking on that to get to 'Internal memory' and then clicking that will get you to the folders when you drag and drop your music to.
I cheated a little and cut and pasted mine to 'Albums' rather than 'Music' as i don't use Windows Media Player and didn't feel liking having to.
If you didn't use Windows Media Player this next bit is critical:
When you have loaded the player use the down key (The one at 'Six o'clock') to go down to 'Folder'. okay that and hunt for 'Albums'. Having found the Album you want, okay that and okay play all for that album.
That way the player finds all the files (songs) in that album in the order you ripped them as the other options are really for those who used Windows Media Player and don't synchronize up right, something I found out the hard way!
The sound quality is very good - the very lowest bass isn't as good as my Minidisc but close lacking the bloatedness often found while the mids and high notes are very smooth on my Sennhesier HD201's driving them well.
If you told your player you lived in North America which I did you defeat that EU inspired obligatory limiter that getting decent sound levels into higher quality less sensitive headphones such as Sennhesier's difficult by cutting out when the voltage goes above a preset level.
Unfortunately the EU bureaucrats didn't understand how loud a pair of headphones go depends on their sensitivity and that varies.Grrr!!!
I find using it pretty intuitive.

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