The Great Big SanDisk Clip Sport Plus Wish List

I am a SanDisk Clip fan and have recently bought a SanDisk Clip Sport Plus. It’s my third SanDisk Clip. I like it … but…

With my previous players I have installed Rockbox. This allowed me to really customise my player. However, it was only after I purchased my Clip Sport Plus that I discovered that I cannot install Rockbox on it. It also looks unlikely that there will be a version of Rockbox for Clip Sport Plus due to hardware constraints.

This means I am stuck with the native Clip Sport Plus interface which offers very little by way of customisation. But I know that SanDisk are constantly evolving the firmware so I thought it might be helpful to list here some of the features I would like to see in future versions of the Clip Sport interface. For background, I mostly use my Clip Sport Plus for listening to podcasts. I use MediaMonkeyas my podcast manager:  So here it is, in no particular order, my

Great Big SanDisk Clip Sport Plus Wish List :

  1. Accelerating fast-forward and rewind, where holding down the fast-forward or rewind button will speed up the fast-forward or rewind. The standard speed is fine for finding a place in a song or short clip. However, it takes too long to get through a 2-hour podcast!  
  2. Option to auto-change from one folder to the next so I don’t have to manually navigate to the next folder.
  3. Option to display the date and time on all screens
  4. Option to display remaining battery as a percentage rather than an icon
  5. Option to speed up horizontal scroll speed - it can take quite a while to read a long track title
  6. Option to change how a track title is displayed e.g. change if and how date, track number, title, next track title and previous track title are displayed
  7. Theme options - including themes that use the screen real estate better. There’s a lot of unused or underused space on the display screen. Consider a dark theme. 
  8. More reliable display of album art: album art is not displayed for many of my podcasts.
  9. Voice cues so I can navigate the Clip Sport Plus without looking at the screen (would be a great addition for users with sight constraints too) 
  10. Have a dedicated top-level section for podcasts. It doesn’t make sense to me why the Podcast folder is under the Books top-level section
  11. Option to maintain the folder structure in the Music section - when I drag and drop folders of music onto the device and open the Music section I can no longer see the folders I dragged and dropped. I’ve overcome this by creating playlists but that’s an extra step I’d rather not to have to do. 

That’s it for now. I’ll add more feature ideas if I come up with more. Would anyone else like to add some features they’d like to see in future versions of the SanDisk firmware or hardware?  

1 Like

One more item for the wish list:

  1. Option to control the order in which tracks are listed. My podcasts synchronise with the oldest episode first. I’d rather it the other way around so that the latest episode is displayed first. 

i Agree with this person i like this wish list i hope sandisk make this come true on the next firmware update :smiley:

1 Like

Another wish list item

  1.  Option to be able to adjust playback speed of podcasts. Oddly, this option is available for audiobooks but not for podcasts.

#14 For audiobooks, have the option for the right side time, which currently lists the total audiobook length, count down the remaining time, while the left side time continues to count up.

1 Like

Another one for the list…

#15 Back button operation when navigating podcast hierarchy: When I’m listening to a podcast and want to return to my list of podcasts, clicking the back button once brings me to the list of episodes for that podcast.  Clicking the back button again should bring me back to the list of podcasts (i.e. to the folders for each podcast e.g. 99% Invisible, Radiolab, Science Friday). Instead clicking the back button brings you back to the Books menu item which required that I click twice to return to the list of podcast folders. Very annoying! 

when the player is in play mode the back button will go to the previous screen in your case the list of episodes. Now the player is in a list view. if you want to go to the previous screen from here use the << button. it will go back to the previous screen which should be the list of podcasts. If you use the back button from a list view it will go back to the main menu. It is a bit unintuitive but the clip sport, jam, and sport plus all work this way. 

1 Like

Thanks drlucky, that worked. It’s a bit counter intuitive though. 

Gapless Playback and Auto advance to next Folder is all I need!

1 Like

This suggestion is a little out there but stick with me.  I would like to see the Sport Clip Plus support incorporate the rebble.io OS or the FreeRTOS.  It would be able to load apps through a phone like the old pebble watch.  It would communicate with your phone over blue tooth and apps might use the phones extended capabilities.  Sandisk could have it’s own app store or leverage one from rebble.io.  It would extend the device much further than an mp3 player.  I don’t know the processor and ram in the SCP.  Perhaps it is unable to meet the challenge.

I want a smaller player like the Clips of old or the Agptek:

https://www.amazon.com/G05-Portable-Playback-Independent-Silicone/dp/B01I2LBZAM/ref=pd_sim_422_4?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=HP6H1Y5YSESTC8GNGCZY

Why it’s huge and bloated now is beyond me. There’s no card slot and only bluetooth has been added (2yrs too late).

I want a card slot back. Even the lower tier Chinese brands can make a better clip knockoff and keep the card slot and add bluetooth.

I want the GUI to actually improve year after year. The Go List is extremely limited. I still can’t save a go list as a real playlist, and I still can’t edit it. The back button and rewind button have inconsistent actions when navigating.

How about the ability to plug it in to my phone so I can do direct transfers of music and playlists or create an app that allows it to do that through bluetooth. Even a newer company like Shanling has a company designing an app that can do that.

Stop cheaping out on the plastic. It looks like a kids toy now, yet it cost even more.

And how about not crippling the ability to make a simple playlist and transfer it to the Clip. Why must I jump through hoops in 2017 to put a playlist on my player? This is just dumb and shows an extremely poor effort on Sandisk’s part showing they are completely out of touch with how to advance their line. Why people still buy these things is beyond me. And I made the mistake of doing just that in an emergency and completely regret it. It’s getting returned as defective because the playlist thing is a glaring defect in my eyes. If you don’t think so you drink way too much Kool Aid and an apologist for a company and product line completely out of touch with the customer base that still wants this type of player.

@wootclip wrote:

This suggestion is a little out there but stick with me.  I would like to see the Sport Clip Plus support incorporate the rebble.io OS or the FreeRTOS.  It would be able to load apps through a phone like the old pebble watch.  It would communicate with your phone over blue tooth and apps might use the phones extended capabilities.  Sandisk could have it’s own app store or leverage one from rebble.io.  It would extend the device much further than an mp3 player.  I don’t know the processor and ram in the SCP.  Perhaps it is unable to meet the challenge.

Shanling kind of does this with their players. You can connect via cable to your phone and transfer. And there is a developer who created an app that works via bluetooth to act as a mirror to the player and you can make playlists and such. Would be nice if the app also acted as a transfer device so I could transfer a playlist via bluetooth as well or add music. But the direct cable option is nice. Haven’t tried it yet on my Shanling M1. Shame to see other companies doing things Sandisk had years to incorporate into their products to keep their players relevant. The Chinese off brands are improving and other companies that make hi res players with better DAC’s are making better products as well. Sandisk remains stagnant and seems to be going backwards.

  1. Accelerating fast-forward and rewind, where holding down the fast-forward or rewind button will speed up the fast-forward or rewind. The standard speed is fine for finding a place in a song or short clip. However, it takes too long to get through a 2-hour podcast!  

Has this problem been solved?

I have what I believe is the latest firmware (2.13B) and this faster fast forward/rewind feature isn’t available. :frowning:

1 Like

How about putting Date and Time back into the Clip Sport Plus?

This product is getting pretty pathetic as Sandisk continues to remove all the nice features that made it such a great product.

How about a new CLIP ZIP with Bluetooth?  - Now THAT would be worthwhile!

Two things for me:

  1. Ability to sync play counts with MediaMonkey (or any app).

  2. Stronger blue tooth. With my Sport Plus clipped to my waistband, with my arm swinging as I walk or if I turn my head, I lose signal.

(it would also be nice if any developers, or anyone from San Disk would read these posts)

  1. Remember position of all audiobooks

  2. For audiobooks, change the “forward” button behavior so that single push moves to next chapter, rather than next audio book (that can be easily done through selecting the book directly from menu, and it is almost never desirable to list through audio books)

  3. What others wrote, accelerated seek, as an alternative to 2).

It’s sad to see regressions from Sandisk clip sport firmware.

I would like to see _more_ editable playlists supplied.  Having nine built-in playlists would be very helpful to me.  But I would settle for fewer if program size is critical.  My sense is that there is a built-in database that organizes the playlisted songs in the SPORT PLUS and that maybe increasing the size of that database in the supplied software might be a problem.