Posts Tagged MP3 player

The Sansa slotRadio is a strange concept, but it works brilliantly in practice. It’s a pre-loaded MP3 player with 1,000 songs, plus a radio, all in a tiny clip-on package. Put a new chip in the slot, you’ve got 1,000 new songs instantly.

I love my iPod Classic, especially when I’m on a long flight or I need to keep my daughter entertained while traveling. The thing is, as user-friendly as the whole interface is, I’m really lazy about loading it up with new music, despite the fact I’ve got a thousand CDs sitting one room away from the computer…and I have an eMusic subscription…and I review new world music albums every couple months for Perceptive Travel. But unlike a teenager with all the time in the world, I always seem to have something else higher on the to-do list.

So I was intrigued by the idea of this Sansa player as a time saver and I’ve enjoyed it far more than I expected. First there’s the level of surprise, which is ever better than it is with the iPod Shuffle because you really don’t know what’s coming next. You didn’t load it up to start with. Plus you can see the artist and song name on the display—my main beef with the Shuffle. It’s almost as small as the 2nd generation Shuffle though, and has a clip on the back, plus it has a radio for listening to NPR or local music in a foreign country. Not a bad value for a hundred bucks including the first 1,000 song sampler.

To load up new music, you simply pop out the old card and pop in a new one. You have to be careful getting them out of the annoying blister pack they come in though: the micro cards are smaller than a fingernail and it took me a couple minutes to find mine on my messy desk when it went flying out of the packaging. These slotRadio cards are $40 each for 1,000 songs and come categorized by Hip-hop, Country, 80s/90s music, etc. If you do the math that’s a few cents per song (compared to a buck at iTunes), a good deal considering these are mostly top-notch name artists, A-list tunes rather than also-rans that were cheap to license.

The mix is sometimes bizarre—it’ll go from The James Gang to Caesars to Jefferson Airplane in the “workout” playlist of the radio mix version—but that’s part of the charm. If you don’t want to listen to Coldplay for the umpeenth thousandth time, just hit the skip button and go to the next tune. It’s like satellite radio with no commercials, but the ability to move on if a song is getting on your nerves. Not as fine-tuned as your own playlists or Pandora, but maybe that’s a good thing. I might not put Tom Petty or Cheap Trick on my own iPod, but I always seem to like those old songs enough to let them run when they come on.

To get these tunes, however, you have to accept a proprietary system with digital rights management. In other words, no copying. You lose the card, you lose the songs. You lose the player with a card in it, there’s no backup at home. If you and a few friends or family members had these slotRadio players though, you could pass around the cards of course. The slotRadio Mix card comes with seven preset playlists of different musical styles like Country and Alternative. Or you can buy individual cards for each genre and those are split into subcategories. For instance the Hip-hop/R&B one I tried out had subcategories like “Love Jams,” “Old School,” and “Dance R&B.”

The headphones suck, as they usually do with all these portable players. Even a decent $10 pair will help, but when I plugged in my Koss KEB24 or Comply NR-10 earbuds I heard a much wider frequency range. The oldies all sounded a bit distorted at high volume, but the Hip-hop tunes sounded better than those on my iPod.

While this may not be the player you want to take on a long round-the-world journey, it would be great to grab while heading out the door on vacation. You would have preset playlists to please everyone and at least 50 hours of continuous music per card.

See more at the Sandisk slotRadio site.