I have been a Sandisk customer for many many years and I always admired your products. I especially fancy your MP3 players, which are of high quality, user friendly, of perfect design and most of all, have all the functions one needs.
I recently had to upgrade from the Sansa Clip+ to the Sansa Clip Jam. I was so happy to get a new Sansa product that fits with my needs. Sadly, I was surprised that my favorite playback option was missing. The Sansa Clip+ had an option to " play all" files in a folder (including root folder and subfolders). Sansa Jam doesn’t! One can chose to play single folders or files, but no “play all” files in folder option exists: one can only play files in one folder at a time.
I kindly ask you to please add this function in a firmware update. The reason I have an mp3 player is to avoid all limitations forced on customers by smartphone companies (especially the necessity to build “libraries” and “playlists” - real hassle when you have huge amounts of various music files/albums).
I sure hope that you will reprogram your playback menu to reinstate this simple yet most usefull function.
Thanks!
Pete
PS: example from Sansa Clip+ user manual:
“4. Alternately, from the Music menu, select Folders>External uSD Card and select either Play All or continue navigating through the folders to the file name of the song you want.”
The way “play all” worked in Clip+ was to play all tracks in a folder (including subfolders), track after track until it played all songs in that folder (with subfolders).
“Shuffle” is an option that was useful on portable CD players when you had 15-20 songs and got bored of the order in which the tracks played (then again, the “shuffle” option often had a very limited algorithm and the songs would always shuffle in the same way…). With over 1000 tracks on an mp3 player nowadays, there is no point (in my case at least) in using the “shuffle” option as you never really get bored of the order in which the songs are played.
I also don’t organise my songs by “Artist”, or any sort of “Playlist” or “Library”, but rather by album/folder; hence, the “Artist” would be of limited help in my case.
As an example, this is how my tracks are organised:
root\ROCK\classic
\hard
\soft
If I want to listen to ROCK, I choose: Folders -> ROCK -> Play all. That way, all ROCK tracks, including classic, soft and hard will be played one by one (…or shuffled if you prefer…)
On the other hand, if I feel like listening to hard rock, I choose: Folders -> ROCK -> hard -> Play all (or just play in this case)
Simply put, the Sansa clip jam gives only option 2… (It will not go from folder to folder, which is a problem when there is many subfolders.)
I still think that including “Play All” would be a very simple thing to do. I do not understand why it was removed in the first place anyway.
Again, I kindly ask Sansa to reinstate the “Play All” option on a future firmware update for the Sansa Clip Jam.
Hello Pete. Thanks for your detailed explanation of this significant deficiency in the Clip Jam (and Clip Sport). I hope SanDisk is still paying attention to suggestions from loyal users.
