“Anyone else having trouble with the menu looping? I haven’t tried every menu and sub-menu, but it seems that the only thing that actually loops is the photo menu.”
All of my menus loop. But I don’t really care… the only real reason that menu looping was required was that the Artist and Song list were nonfunctinal at high capacties and looping would have allowed a left move that looped around to the right to make to genres. With 48 GB of music there was no simply way to make it through songs to genres.
“after the firmware upgrade, nothing has really changed…the capasitive touch control is still troublesome. At times it lags greatly, other times it’s too sensitive. … I’m not even sure if they can fix the touch control sensitivity by firmware upgrade alone…It may be a mechanical thing.”
Yes, still not satisfying when compared to a responsive and well designed UI such as Apple, but the truth is that we finally have what an old software engineer like myself would consider to be an alpha or even beta release, and what a product manager would call 1.0. There can be no doubt that Sansa released this product about a year before it was ready and failed to test at reasonable capacities, but still… this is a MAJOR release. As a developer I can assure you that the touch control sensitivity is 100% related to poor software design, not to hardware (“a mechanical thing”). Hardware simply cannot to be too sensitive or granular… it is poor time slicing in the software that handles the interupts and/or the need to do file system access because of an inefficient indexing strategy (which we have seen repeatedly over the past 8 months). This issue pales in significance to the complete failure of the UI when loaded anywhere over 40% of rated capacity that has finally been addressed. Further fixes in the responsiveness of the UI should be relatively trivial in comparision.
“You know, I was psyched a few months ago when I bought this player…after having it this long, I’m really greatly disappointed in this player. I very much feel ripped off. I read ALL the comments on here & I’m not the only one disappointed. Fuze+ was promising but…I’m afraid it has failed.”
Yep, me too. I sold a GREAT player to buy this and then spent over a hundred hours retagging my collection in a vain attempt to swap genres into artists, combine artists, etc just to get to a collection into a form which I could get some minimal usage from the menus. Sadly, it never did became even minimally functional (until now). So for me this has been a completely unusable purchase that I haul out of a desk drawer every few months or so for a firmware update after checking the Rockbox site and afterwards, a quick curse at Sansa and a new story for my audiophile friends (who tell their friends).
I’m not very picky; all that I ever wanted was basic usability in a small form factor for a large collection. But I really do take offense when I trust a company and get completely ripped off. Sansa has burned quite a bit of trust with me and I am now hesitant to recommend them. I really do appreciate the fact that someone at Sansa heard us. I joined solely because the previous complaints here were way too vague to be actionable and I’m fairly certain that my rather detailed complaints have directly led to this release. I have to admit that the complete lack of feedback from Sansa made me doubt that this was filtering through to the product managers.
Either way, my job here is done… we finally have the minimum for which we paid and that’s fair enough for me.
