My New MP3 Player

The Sansa Clip is a tiny thing at only a couple inches tall. But for thirty-some-odd dollars, I can listen to my Wormwood audio drama or a LOST podcast as I fall into the arms of Morpheus without disturbing anyone.

I can plug it into my PC's USB port and have it pop right up in Computer as if it were just another hard drive. From there it's easy to copy mp3 files directly into one of its folders, disconnect, and go. No synching necessary. Although small, the display uses large text and scrolling to get me through the menus and to display track info. Here is the Sansa Clip in action:



It has 2GB of fixed memory – no hard drive – and no slot for a micro SD card to expand capacity. (I think the next model up, the Fuze, has such a slot.) Two gigs is not a whole lot by today's standards, but enough for a couple weeks worth of bedtime listening, if not more. (And it has a sleep timer.) It also has an FM tuner, which I've not yet tried, if I, say, want to mellow out to the Rev. Velveteen on a Thursday night. In addition, it has a microphone and can transform into a voice recorder should the need arise.

The interface is pretty basic and, having used The D's iPod previously, I found it easy to figure out. Zipping through the menus I found a very basic equalizer which had presets for Rock, Jazz, and Classical as well as the ability to customize the setting. The sound is not bad. Using the generic set of ear buds that came with it, I found the audio fidelity to be about what I thought it would be – flat but highly listenable. I suspect that spending a few hundred dollars on a pair of noise-cancelling headphones would improve my experience but that's not going to happen.

The Clip was fine when listening to an amateur audio drama and a roundtable podcast about LOST's season opener. But high quality mp3s of a professional audio drama and music fared less well. MP3s sound flat to me to begin with and I accept this as a limitation of a format that discards data in pursuit of small file sizes over fidelity. What I found disappointing was the stereo separation. The higher quality files had none and instead sounded like I had two speakers sitting right next to one another in front of me. Disappointing but not unexpected for $35. I intend to try another set of headphones to see if that helps.

Perhaps the most annoying feature of the Clip is the inability to create playlists with the device itself. You must use a media player on your computer. I ended up using Windows Media Player 11 for this simply because I found the instructions for this process first. I've been a Winamp user for years and I can use it instead. Perhaps I'll get around to it one of these days. In fact, I should probably do so soon as I don't care much for WMP. Version 11 is better than 10 but I find that, in the course of performing what I feel are simple tasks, the panes suddenly shift and begin displaying information that I don't want it to display. This being said, I have to admit that creating playlists in WMP11 is not particularly difficult and neither is synching. The only real hassle I've encountered is, after I create a new playlist, the right-hand pane sometimes shifts to a space to drag items into for an Unknown playlist. This despite having highlighted my newly-created one. I am forced to right-click on my playlist and select on option from the context menu.

Since the clip displays info about tracks that it culls from the metadata of my mp3s, I thought it might be a good idea to update all that information. I spent over an hour yesterday evening correcting and adding album names, track titles, years, genres, etc. and I only got through D. And that's just my mp3 music collection, which is comparatively small. I've got many more audio dramas, radio documentaries, and other spoken word ditties than I have mp3 music files. The process of getting the metadata up to date is going to take months. For this task, I've been using a freeware app called MP3tag which is pretty decent. I just need to figure out how to rename a tag in batches. E.g. - if I have 10 tracks from the same album that have no album name, I'd like to be able to change the Album tag on all these files at once since the value will be the same instead of doing one at a time. This is no doubt possible; it's just that I've yet to figure out how.

And that's my sorrowful tale. I kind of feel like I'm in high school again with my Sony Walkman tape player when I've got the Clip cranked. Perhaps things will change and it'll make sense to get a more expensive PMP with or without video. We'll see.

So what PMP do you have? How do you sync it? Are there better tag editors? Any other Clip owners out there?