I Got A Sansa Fuze 8GB!

This is my fourth media player, smallest in size, 2nd smallest by capacity and first non-Creative Labs player after a line including the 4GB MuVo², Zen Touch 20GB and Zen Vision:m 60GB, all decent players although none perfect and all superseded by the relentless march of technology.

The latest player - the Zen Vision:m is a bit of a brick, the battery life isn't great, the battery indicator is worthless and to be perfectly honest the sound quality isn't great. It also has pretty limited audio codec support and came with a proprietary connection slot that required a special adaptor block in order to connect anything to it - including power and computers. I lived with it for over 3 years, time for a change. What I wanted this time round was better battery life, smaller size, better audio codec support and better audio quality. I also wanted a reasonably high capacity storage, however as most manufacturers have transitioned to flash memory based units very high capacity >16-32GB are becoming rarer and more expensive. The Fuze meets most of these requirements, it has a better battery (rated around 25 hours playing mp3 @ 128kbs) far smaller, probably somewhere between a third and a quarter the volume of the zen vision:m, supports loads of audio codecs (including Ogg Vorbis: the one I want to use), and is rated favourably among critics and users in terms of sound quality. The issue with the Fuze is capacity, it comes in internal capacities of 2, 4 and 8GB, that's pretty small and a big step down from the Zen, which (just) fit my entire mp3 collection. The Fuze saving grace in this respect is its micro SDHC expansion slot allowing you to increase the capacity of your unit by up to 32GB (theoretically as 32GB micro SDHC cards aren't readily available yet) - this gives a max theoretical capacity of 40GB, and a practical max capacity of 24GB given currently available cards. Additionally, unlike most other players with expansion slots the Fuze combines its internal and external memories into a single library thereby allowing easier navigation of songs and removing the necessity to remember where songs are before you can find them. After a couple of days use I do have my pros and cons for the player pros: Sounds great Menu navigation is smooth Solid construction Rubberised back - less prone to scratches Replay gain support Ogg Vorbis support Good battery life cons: Volume is a little lower than I'd like Issues with playlist syncing in MSC mode Power/hold slider is difficult to slide Internal battery Attracts dust like a mother fucker The playlist thing was a right pain in the arse, I used MediaMonkey to sync a bunch of playlists to the device - the files copied over and the playlists appeared in the playlists folder - but the playlists were empty. It turned out to be something to do with the way the Fuze interprets the file paths it requires they be relative, MM was sending them absolute. The fix for this was simple - move the playlists into the root folder, add an M3U header and delete the first / from each file path - simple, but ridiculously fucking time consuming. Turns out that using MTP mode gives you no such guff so fuck MSC I'm using MTP until Sansa sort out MSC mode. I'm in the process of adding replay gain tags to all my media to iron out the relative differences in volumes between tracks, which I found much more noticeable on the Fuze than I did with previous players. One of the other cool features of the Fuze is that Sansa are pretty active on improving the firmware periodically adding new features, improvements and bug fixes: for example support for Ogg and flac formats were the result of firmware updates as was the players support for replay gain tagging. Incidentally I got this from Currys via their online Reserve & Collect system, they had the 8GB Fuze + included 4GB micro SDHC card for £64.99 on their website (the 8GB Fuze alone was £69.99!) and my local Currys had it in stock, so I went for it. Using Reserve & Collect Currys are obliged to sell you goods at the online price too - which is nice given the over-inflated pricing of their retail stores. So yeah, the Sansa Fuze, nice little media player for those looking for something small that sounds great and has great codec support. Video playback is shit by the way. freedoms_stain, out.