I see that the 8 Gig Fuze price has just dropped. Does that mean that Sandisk is about to announce new capacities? I am maxxed out with my 4 GB Fuze with 4 GB microSDHC card, but I am hesitant to simply buy a bigger card. I’m hoping that if I wait, Sandisk will announce at least a 16GB Fuze before Christmas time, with a 32 GB being ideal.
I’ve looked into the View… but I haven’t read much good about the firmware on that at all. The Fuze is finally behaving like I want it to with the latest firmware, so I’d like to stick with it if possible.
I have no proof or anything to back up my hopes… I was hoping that one of you might know something. Thanks for any information.
I think that the common consensus is that Sandisk isn’t going to be expanding the internal/shipped/resident memory on future devices…in fact there is speculation that future devices won’t come with installed memory at all. Think about it, why continue the old way of thinking. …putting out several models with different capacities when your devices are designed to take expansion cards. The very least maybe have a model with an internal card (just to have some storage “out of the box” ) with very little memory keeping the cost down and have people buy what they need when they need it. Especially, if the larger cards will be making their way on the market…The old Apple concept of “buy it and buy a new one to upgrade” is dead!
Regular firmware updates and expansion of memory is the reality now Mr. Jobs!
Message Edited by bobletteross on 10-21-2008 06:07 AM
Message Edited by bobletteross on 10-21-2008 06:08 AM
Getting an 8 gig card would be a good idea. With the current firmware, the Fuze can access only around 4,000 songs, so if someone is using a bitrate less than 256 kbps, they may not be able to fully utilize a 16 gig card until a new firmware is released. As for new higher capacity models, imo browsing just by tags when there are a huge number of files would not be convenient. A player that navigates by folders or by tags would be much more convenient to use when there are a huge number of files.
There are a few problems with having a player with no internal memory. The first might be a lack of support for protected files. AFAIK, players that have a card slot don’t play protected music that is on the card. It must be in main memory to work. So this is one reason for having internal memory. Another reason is that I have not seen a player with more than one card slot, so a player with internal memory as well as a card slot could hold more storage.
Do you have one of these cards you pointed us to? I went ahead and ordered one…great price for a class 6! If you have one can you give any details about performance…compared to other 8g cards perhaps? Why should I wait til the 16G cards come way down…this should keep me happy with expanding the collection for quite some time. No I won’t have it ALL on the Fuze yet without swapping but…maybe in a few months the 16g cards will be on sale for $50 or so…
It was getting a bit tight on the 8g Fuze internal (for artists a-f) with an 8G external (for artists g-p), plus a 2G (for artists r-z). Of course leaving some room in each memory for additions. How does everyone setup their storage?
I do not. I just buy whatever is cheapest and haven’t had any issues with any of them. My 8 gb one is a SanDisk that I got for about $35. They all seem to be the same to me.
Some people have gotten more songs on their storage using a variable bitrate, perhaps averaging 192 kbps, rather than using 256 kbps fixed. I wouldn’t recommend that for the Fuze now, as there have been some issues with the Fuze and variable bitrate files. Hopefully this will be resolved with the next firmware update.
I imagine the class rating of the card will impact the database refresh rate. Perhaps it might be much less than the speed difference of the cards? It would be nice to see an experiment done for a class 2 card and a class 6 card with the same files on each.
I just ordered the 8 GB card from Newegg. Good deal for the price and shipping. This is only a stopgap solution though. My music collection is around 7000 songs (~30GB). I’m in the process of getting rid of all the stuff I don’t listen too and never would (ex-girlfriends putting Brit Spears and the like on my computer…) so I’m guessing I’ll wean that down to around 20-25 GB. I also belong to eMusic and get 50 songs a month at 192 kbps VBR (which I’ve had zero problems with the Fuze so far) so I’m constantly getting more music.
To the people that question why I want/need that much on my player, it’s because I have a job where I can listen to music all day (programmer) and I also have a long cummute time (~2 hours a day, 3 days a week), so I listen to my Fuze roughly 8 hours a day between work and driving. It’s nice to be able to pull up anything I might be in the mood for.
Now if a 16GB Fuze comes out… I can buy that and just pop in this new 8GB card and be happy for the most part.
As far as I know, Apple is the only company that keeps their new products secret until the release date. It causes a lot of customers to pay full price for products that are about to be phased out. Apple is probably the only company that can get away with that!
If Sansa was going to release a higher-capacity Fuze this quarter, I suspect we would have heard something.
I have an 8GB Fuze with an 8GB card. The internal flash is slower, so I keep music on there that I don’t expect to change much. All total, about 2,700 songs. The Songs menu is of course useless, and the Artist and Album menus are painful. I keep all my music in about two dozen genres, and that makes navigation reasonable.
I’m updating all of the mp3 tags in my collection, and all the music I keep on the Fuze has been updated. I find that if you browse by Genre, and have all the tags lined up right, finding music is easy. Just my 2 cents on the issue.
As far as I know, Apple is the only company that keeps their new products secret until the release date. It causes a lot of customers to pay full price for products that are about to be phased out. Apple is probably the only company that can get away with that!
If Sansa was going to release a higher-capacity Fuze this quarter, I suspect we would have heard something.
Funny, I always thought just the opposite. Apple always seems to ‘leak’ something (probably intentional) about new things in the pipeline. That buzz gets everyone’s juices flowing, and is why we see people camped out on the sidewalks on front of Apple stores for days just so they pay $600 for a phone that you can’t get service on yet (and when you do, it costs the other arm & other leg) and ultimately gets the price lowered only 3 months after it’s initial release.
There is a whole network of Apple zealots & zombies whose entire goal in life is to ‘spread the word’! On the other hand, I heard nothing about this new ‘Sansa Slotmusic’ player before it’s arrival the other day, and the 16GB SDHC Micro-card was kept pretty hush-hush too until it’s release last month.
I’d say SanDisk keeps a pretty tight lid on it’s new developments and products until they are ready to tell us about them.
I DID hear there’s an 8GB Clip coming out soon, though.
I think that the common consensus is that Sandisk isn’t going to be expanding the internal/shipped/resident memory on future devices…in fact there is speculation that future devices won’t come with installed memory at all. Think about it, why continue the old way of thinking. …putting out several models with different capacities when your devices are designed to take expansion cards.
For one, there is not a way to put DRM protected content on a flash card. As such, the player would not be able to play DRM product. Sansa has already put out a “memory-less” player to be marketed with their new “slotMusic” initiative which is basically buying preloaded memory cards that you simply put in the player, Kind of like buying a CD, with a case and liner notes, but a microSD card full of 256kbs MP3’s instead of a CD. These slotMusic players do not support any DRM at all.
For this to work, the media must be DRM free. Now while DRM has been largely discarded, the only valid need for DRM is to work with the likes of Rhapsody and Napster. Granted, not “huge” markets, but markets such as audio books and video (like Ipod video) still utilize DRM extensively.
For DRM to work on a SD card, there would need to be a way to tie the card to the specific player so that the media is unusable unless in the actual player that the SD card is tied to. I don’t know if that is currently possible under current DRM methods.
Until Sansa officially discard DRM as a supported file type, the “media-less” player will not become a reality.
The “S” in SD/SDHC stands for secure. There is a standard for or controlling the copying, moving and deletion of digital media, implemented on these cards.Its possible that there is a licencing issue, since Sandisk isn’t one of the companies that copyrighted that standard.
