My Top Four Product Feature Suggestions

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1

I really like these players (I have the Clip and a friend has different model). And because I like it so much, it makes the few annoying things really bother me. Soon I’ll be wanting to get player with more capacity. I’d love to be able to stick with Sansa, but if these issues don’t get addressed I’ll probably buy something else.

#1: Bookmarking

As many others have noted, listening to books is a frustrating experience because you loose your place in the book any time you want to listen to music or even connect to the computer.

#2: Gapless Play

Not everyone listens to 3-minute sound-bite pop-music. I’m a jam band fan. But I know this issue applies to classical music as well. Having gaps in music it s HUGE turn-off for a “music” player.

#3: Larger Capacity

Put those 16, 24, 48, 64, and 256 MB cards in these machines. We’ll buy 'em. 

#4: Separate Books from Music

Book “files” can not be put in the “book” folder (unless they are Audible Audio .AA files). So then if you play tunes randomly, it sometimes plays book files.

Thanks,

Gary

PS: Replying to these forum posts every few days would be a good customer service “feature” too.

2

#1 and #4 are addressed in the new Fuze. There are now two folders: Audiobooks and Podcasts. Any playable file (.AA, .mp3, .wma) placed in these folders is automatically bookmarked on exit, so the next time it’s started a popup asks if you want to resume it or start it from the beginning. There are also Audiobooks and Podcasts entries along with the usuall Artists, Albums, etc. in the Music list so they can be seperated from the playlist.

It’s a great system. There’s a slight tradeoff between convenience and flexibility in that you can’t set a bookmark at a particular place and keep listening, or set multiple bookmarks in a single file, but you also don’t have to remember to set a bookmark when you exit a file because it’s set automatically.      

#3 is sort of addressed with the microsdhc expansion slot, and with Sandisk’s excellent integration of card media with the library it’s true memory expansion, unlike the crippled implementation Creative uses for example.

#2 is unfortunately hard to come by for some reason, but if Rockbox gets ported to the Fuze that problem will go away as well.