The Sansa Fuze allows you to seek using the left and right sides of the scroll wheel. As you hold the wheel down, it skips by increasingly larger increments. This works rather well and is, in my opinion, almost the right way of accomplishing this. Personally, I would prefer what I believe you are describing, which is to run my finger in circles around the scroll wheel in order to seek.
The normal fast forward and rewind behavior of the Fuze is suppressed for audio books in order to comply with the Audible performance requirements.
I believe it is intended to prevent instant, arbitrary and accidental skipping off of long audio tracks, which would bypass the normal bookmarking-on-exit system. To skip a track in an audio book use the ‘back to music list’ menu navigation.
I know exactly what you are thinking of: scan through song. The e200v2 player has this feature, from the submenu, allowing a rapid and variable speed sweep through a long podcast. I was surprised to find that the new Fuze does not have this feature.
The Scan Through Song feature temporarily redirects the scroll wheel as a variable sweep control through the track. After two seconds of inactivity, the control reverts back to volume control.
The problem with the feature as currently implemented on the e200 is the function end delay is far too short: one needs to hear more than just a few words in a podcast to determine if the selected point is the desired one. The delay needs to be increased to five seconds, up slightly from the two second setting .
Hopefully, this feature may find its way to the Fuze. The new scroll wheel is butter smooth.
Currently, the scan through song feature is not implemented for Audible books on the e200 either.
The more you work with the Fuze, the more it will amaze you. Operational details have been addressed pretty well on this device. I find the control functions smooth and logical.
There are a few kinks in the works, like the missing wraparound scroll for song / artist / album lists. I am hopeful that this will be addressed in the upcoming firmware.
The podcast folder / “snag by genre” function of the Fuze can be confusing if your podcasts are synchronized as playlists via Windows Media Player. Essentially, one is stuck with an apparently blank screen when trying to access synchronized podcast playlists. Scrolling through my playlists, I found two were empty…but the GUI doesn’t say “empty”, it simply yeilds a blank screen! The podcasts are grouped together in the podcast folder. If the ID3 tag has “podcast” as the genre, as podcasts should, the GUI doesn’t know what to display (for the active playlist), since the podcasts are elsewhere.
Perhaps, for this condition, the GUI should display “files moved to Podcast folder” if a playlist is synchronized containing podcast material, and the genre is podcast. The remaining files can remain in the playlist folder.
I’m having a great time walking the device through its paces.
I also think so. I just have to get used to the new ‘experience’. The podcast/audiobook feature is the main reason why i considered the Sansa Fuze on the first place. And this is just working great as far as i can tell after just one day playing around with the Sansa. I do not use Windows Media Player and i’ll never do. The MSC mode is perfect for me just drag 'n drop. I’m so glad that i don’t have to mess around with iTunes anymore. This is good because i’m currently switching to Linux OS on my desktop. JD