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Review: Sansa Clip+ MP3 with Rockbox | ||
Tags: MP3-Player | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| DavidW Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6529 days ago 318 posts - 458 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, French, Italian, Persian, Malay Studies: Russian, Arabic (Written), Portuguese, German, Urdu | Message 1 of 4 02 August 2011 at 6:05pm | IP Logged | ||
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A small review of my new MP3 player: A Sansa Clip+ with the Rockbox firmware. MP3
players are pretty important for language study, and I've spent quite some time looking for a suitable one. Installing the new firmware is pretty easy and takes about 30mins. It's not much harder than installing a piece of windows software. I then changed the theme on the player to one with bigger fonts ('Cliplined'). Pluses: -Tiny player -Pause and FF/RW work really well, excellent interface -Buttons easy to use, even in your pocket -Handles pretty much any format audio (Ogg, FLAC, Speex, AAC, ATRAC3...) and long files well -Works like a USB stick to copy audio onto it, no special software -Navigate by Database (by Artist, Album etc.) or Folders- no need to fix tags on all your audio. -Cheap (20 UKP on Ebay for 2GB version) -Standard headphone and USB connection (no fancy cables to lose) -Expand memory with a MicroSD card, 16GB+ -Battery lasts ages (compared to smartphones etc.) and charges from USB -Excellent sound quality Minuses: -Screen is small, older people might struggle a bit with the small fonts. -FM radio has lousy reception. -No video playback, internet, email, telephone etc. etc. (a plus?) Overall I'm really impressed. Rockbox is excellent mature software, is well thought out, and has pretty much every feature you could want in an MP3 player. Appart from FF/RW with sound, but this is pretty rare in MP3 players. The 'Clip' and 'Clip+' are pretty similar. The Clip+ can be expanded with a microSD memory card, however. The Clip+ also has to be switched off before attaching the USB cable for file transfers when using Rockbox, which is not true for the Clip, you can plug it in anytime. Edit: After playing around with it for some time, the software is almost seems too flexible, and it takes a little while to get to know all the features. I wouldn't recommend it to non-geeks. One nice feature is that you can reassign the Next and Previous buttons to skip time (i.e. 5 secs) in the audio, rather than changing track. This makes it impossible to skip tracks when you didn't mean to, useful when listening to very long tracks. Also you can change the playback speed. To save you the hassle of looking through the different themes, these theme settings work well: Font: 12-Adobe-Helvetica While Playing Screen: Cliplined Base Skin: Cliplined Show Icons: No Scrollbar: Right, Width: 6px Line Selector Type: Pointer Edited by DavidW on 05 August 2011 at 3:06am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Warp3 Senior Member United States forum_posts.asp?TID= Joined 5538 days ago 1419 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Korean, Japanese | Message 2 of 4 07 August 2011 at 1:52am | IP Logged | ||
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I've never used a Clip+ or Rockbox, but I have had great luck with the Sansa players, in general. (I own a 4GB Fuse (with a 16GB MicroSD card), a 4GB Clip, and a 1GB Clip.) The number of built-in UI languages and filename language support seems to be quite huge. As someone who is studying a language with a non-Latin-based script that was a rather important aspect for me.
I could see that "skip time instead of next track" function being very useful for audiobooks and podcasts. I may have to try loading Rockbox on one of my MP3 players now. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Zwlth Super Polyglot Senior Member United States Joined 5229 days ago 154 posts - 320 votes Speaks: English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Arabic (Written), Dutch, Swedish, Portuguese, Latin, French, Persian, Greek | Message 3 of 4 07 August 2011 at 5:44am | IP Logged | ||
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I also use a Sansa Clip+ 8GB for all of my portable language listening needs and I am so happy with it that I bought another as a backup for the day when I lost or broke mine. Well, that day came about 11 months into its life when it just stopped working overnight. And, with their 1 year guarantee still in place, they replaced it no questions asked. So, now I'm using the new one and have the replacement for the old one as a backup.
Although I am clearly quite happy with it, it was still not specifically designed for audiobooks / language learning materials, and so there are some quirks. Before I detail them, though, let me say that in my limited experience with other MP3 players (a Phillips GoGear is the only one I've had, though I've sampled a good half dozen belonging to friends before buying the Sansa Clip), the Sansa Clip + has fewer of these quirks than any other I've tested. But here they are: 1. In music mode, if the name of the artist has an accented letter in it, there's about a 75% chance that the name of the song will be invisible, even if you set the default language to that language. 2. If your audio book has different folders for different chapters, then you either have to rename the files or only load one folder at a time. Otherwise, it will play file 01 from folder 01, then file 01 from folder 02, etc., before playing file 02 from folder 01. 3. On certain other commercially available audio-books, it will play chapter 01, 11, 21, etc., then 02, 12, 22, etc. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| patuco Diglot Moderator Gibraltar Joined 7018 days ago 3795 posts - 4268 votes Speaks: Spanish, English* Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 4 07 August 2011 at 12:54pm | IP Logged | ||
These are the reasons I got mine. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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