Clip Zip Feedback and Feature Request Thread

@tapeworm wrote:


@neutron_bob wrote:

I agree.  The elapsed time / total or remaining, _ and _ track count (1 / 7 for example) as displayed on the other Sansas would be preferable.



@miikerman wrote:

In listening to an album, irritating not to have the track counter (e.g. 3/15).  Likewise not to have a “Play all” option at the top of an album listing.


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But the “Play All” option is not only needed at the Album level, but at the very top level (Artist) as well.

 

These options, features, display cues, whatever you want to call them have been an intregal and depended-on part of the Sansa firmware through several different models for several years now. Why all of a sudden yank the plug on such useful information and control methods?

Yes, please add in the aforementioned features.  They are very useful to have on the player.

I have a 4gb purple clip zip bought for my daughter, and have been getting some advice from SanDisk here in UK regarding the RDS not working at all with the player.  Strangely, they seem to be unaware or in denial that the CZ is (at least for some people) capable of displaying RDS station information out of the box.

For example, one of SanDisk’s support advisers emailed me to say :  

“RDS is not a feature of the Clip Zip. This information indeed appears in some SanDisk forums, but please bear in mind that forums are open communities created by SanDisk users in order to express their ideas. If the paperwork which came with the player definitely states RDS display is one of its “features” where the service is available, please provide us with a copy to forward to our marketing department.”

I’ve posted a thread here on that (not sure how to link to it).

Since RDS obviously is a working feature on some people’s clips but not others, my pleas to SanDisk are:

  1. Please do not drop this very nice, attractive, and useful feature.
  2. Please continue to work on getting RDS display working properly for everyone.
  3. Please make some sort of announcement either clarifying whether or not for now all clip zips are in theory capable of displaying RDS info, subject to future software updates becoming available,  OR saying clearly if the RDS features of the present batch of CZ’s on sale in Britain (or for that matter elsewhere)  will only ever work in certain countries. (If this is a software issue, I’d also suggest it goes in the list of known issues with the current firmware release).

I’m no expert, but since US FM radio is a specific setting on clip zip it could be that the clip zip is only capable of RDS display on that setting in the sates.  (And even there, looks like there are bugs in how it is working right now).

@kitt wrote:

 

For example, one of SanDisk’s support advisers emailed me to say :  

 

“RDS is not a feature of the Clip Zip. This information indeed appears in some SanDisk forums, but please bear in mind that forums are open communities created by SanDisk users in order to express their ideas. If the paperwork which came with the player definitely states RDS display is one of its “features” where the service is available, please provide us with a copy to forward to our marketing department.”

 

Feel free to send them a link to their own Quick Start Guide that is included with the players themselves and also posted here on the forum:

http://mp3support.sandisk.com/downloads/qsg/clipzip-qsg.pdf

See Device Features, Item #2b:

RDS information for FM radio broadcasts (when available)

RDS doesn’t work on my Zip. Please, Sandisk, don’t fix this but give me track counters instead… that’s just about all I want.

My two cents: Would it be possible in next firmware to natively listen and charge at the same time the player once connected to a PC ?

There is some possible tricks to make it possible (USB wall charger, etc.) but I believe that it is feasible in a more convenient way as some others MP3 player (ipod, etc.) support it (by USB eject command).

How about having the option to have the display on all the time when connected to external power. Or have it come on at the end of a track and at the beginning of a track for a slect amount of time eg. 45 seconds. Why have album art if yoy can’t see it?

@njones wrote:

How about having the option to have the display on all the time when connected to external power. Or have it come on at the end of a track and at the beginning of a track for a slect amount of time eg. 45 seconds. Why have album art if yoy can’t see it?

All the previous players did this. People complained that the screen being on for hours at a time while it was beinig charged was wearinig out the LED screens. So Sandisk changed the Zip so that the screen goes off while charging.

Having the backlight come on and turn off between tracks just so you can see the album art between tracks is wasteful on the battery. If you want to do it manually, that’s easy enough to do, but most people aren’t going to want this to do it.

This player could not handle m4a (aac) files with 320 kbps data rates . They became unlistenable When screen goes dark.

The Clip Zip has a full color raster OLED display.  Leaving it on isn’t a good idea for the overall service life.  The Fuze+, Fuze, and e200 have LCD displays with separate backlights.

The above players also have the option of running while docked, when a constant-on display is nice to have.

Bob  :wink:

So I finally got my Clip Zip, and here’s my (overall positive) feedback:

The Good:

  1. Hardware: The clip is visibly sturdier, even if the two side hinges could still benefit from being a little thicker.
  2. Hardware: With the Clip+, I very often pressed two buttons at once, just by not pressing on the exact middle of a side of the square. No such problem with the Clip Zip!
  3. Hardware: It looks better in person than on the pictures. It looks better than the Clip+.
  4. Software: Much simpler and more logical basic organization.
  5. Software: More options to boot!

The Bad:

  1. Hardware: After a couple of days using it, the minus side of the volume button stopped clicking. It still works, but the tactile feedback is about gone.
  2. Software: Sometimes, as with the Clip+, the pause function doesn’t work (no, I didn’t lock the Clip): it stutters then keeps going; I have to turn it off and on again for the pause function to work again. It can be embarrassing when I try to understand something said to me.
  3. Software: In the original Clip, with audiobooks, you could rewind over tracks. With the Clip+ and the Clip Zip, you can’t: if you miss a passage and it happens to be over two tracks, you have to go to the tracks menu, then to the track before, and then press forward until nearly the end of the track – which you can’t do without looking.

I would prefer that the settings would be saved when i made a firmware update and I must not change the setting after the update again.

The folder structure on the internal flash memory and the external micro SDHC is not the same. The internal folders of “Audiobooks” and “Podcasts” are on the same level as “Music”. The external folders of “Audiobooks” and “Podcasts” are subfolders of “Music”:

http://www.picfront.de/d/8p5t

In my settings the album art is “off” and I would prefer to see the remaining time of a song in the display when this setting is “off”.

This is my 4th SanDisk MP3 player. I had the prior clip and replaced it with the Zip recently.
Note that I called it an MP3 player. It needs some improvements to make it actually useful for that job.

  1. when I switch from FM to Music it should know what the last thing I was listening to was. Just like the prior model offered.
  2. it should know where in that track I was. Just like the prior model offered.

Do you know how irked a person can get when they have to go in and figure out which minute of which of the 60 podcasts they left off on? I don’t want to have to stop and delete each track as I finish it. I don’t want to search through and figure out if I was last listening to marketplace_t or marketplace_t where everything the “t” is cut off and I have to wait for it to scroll?

  1. It should have a play all function. This was broken in the last model too. If I selected play all and all of my mp3 files were in one directory it would only list half of them. I would have to go to folders -. external -. etc to get the actual full list of files
  2. It offers a main screen for books, music, card, sport etc but not one for podcasts? WUWT?
  3. minor issue= I would like to be able to use the FM radio when it is plugged into a computer charging.
  4. minor issue= it doesn’t tell me how many tracks are loaded. Prior model did.

Why does a new version come out that doesn’t offer many of the features as the prior model?
I would rather use my old Clip where the clip part is actually broken than this new one. If those first two functions aren’t fixed in a firmware update shortly I will in fact stop using it because of trying to compensate for decreased functionality in the newer model that existed in the older ones.  At this point there is nothing zippy about the zip. 

Resume doesn’t work after power on when I used before the last power off the shuffle list within a folder (selecting folders will give the option to shuffle content in folder and allows you to 
see your folder structure.). A new shuffle list will be started.

I must say that between the last power off and the new power on I copied a few songs in other folders via usb mode and a new database loading was made. 

I use dbpoweramp to convert my CD’s to FLAC format.  I think a lot of people use dbpoweramp for encoding FLAC and 90% of the album art dbpoweramp embeds with the FLAC files is between 200-300kb.  The other 10% is below 100kb.  As of right now none of my FLAC files have album art displaying on the Sansa Clip Zip because of the 100kb cut off.  This really needs to be addressed because I doubt anyone will resize all there album art to work with one player.  I have read discussions about this issue on several different forums.

My feature request:

  1. Add Album Art support for files greater than 100kb.  90% of dbpoweramp album art is between 200-300kb per image. The other 10% is below 100kb. 

I do my encoding with EAC, and it lets you choose small, medium, or large size for the album art. You can find 400x400, 500x500 in any of the three sizes, but the small size ones are similar to what you’d see at Amazon.com…that’s good enough for me, and they’ll work on all my players (except the Clip+ and Shuffle, of course)

Another issue I encountered:

  1. Replay Gain is not working on my FLAC files.  I encoded all my FLAC files with dbpoweramp and included the DSP effect “Replay Gain” and the file tags say they contain Replay Gain information.  However, when I view track info on the Clip Zip the replay gain information is not there?

The physical size is not what matters it is the file size.  You can have a 500x500 image be 23kb or 230kb depending on the compression level.  As far as I can tell most encoders want to embed high quality album art with files (between 200-300kb).  If you tagged all your files with 100kb or lower album art the art would not look good if displayed by a system like Windows Media Center on a HD display (1080p).

@blk02 wrote:

Another issue I encountered:

 

  1. Replay Gain is not working on my FLAC files.  I encoded all my FLAC files with dbpoweramp and included the DSP effect “Replay Gain” and the file tags say they contain Replay Gain information.  However, when I view track info on the Clip Zip the replay gain information is not there?

I don’t believe Replay Gain is supported (on the Clip Zip) with FLAC files, only MP3.

no1 — On track playback. Pleaaaaase offer time and time remaing info!!! sometimes I listen to long play mixes and need to see what time on the track I’m upto. Also display more info and scroll the artist name. Old player had this yet the screen on this one is bigger but limiting.

I don’t care about the cover art I care about the music track info I’m currently listening to.

no2 — Please offer more display colour variety themes. I would like a dark theme so black background and colourful text such as white/green or blue. Looks much better in my opinion, I’m not a big fan of orange purple combo.

If the above 2 are corrected I’d quite happily buy another, especially an all metal edition that others have recommended as well.

hi

the Arabic menue looks OK

but the device can’t read Arabic names of my songs