As far as I know, the powerup & shutdown don’t have any effect on the battery life but I could be wrong… Yes, rechargable batteries do drain slowly over time, but that’s not the problem since I’ve only had my Clip since the beginning of January. Rechargable batteries last for years… As I indicated in my previous posts, I had 16 hrs & 45 min with an older firmware but 3 hrs LESS with the current firmware. I’m doing another test to verify my last results, so I’ll see if there’s any difference.
Also, regarding sassafrass’s battery tests… was it taken into consideration that shutdown and startup of the player may affect battery life? What about the natural discharge of the battery over this 2-week period? What I mean is that the clip’s battery, like all batteries, has a tendency to discharge over time.
Sasafrass452 - I think the bigger issue might be that it’s been a number of months between the first test and the latest test. Can you do some kind of equivalent test back to back with 01.01.20 and 01.01.29? That would minimize or eliminate the possibility that the battery has lost a bit of capacity at full charge between the first test and latest test. My laptop batteries seem to lose a portion of their capacity within the first year of use so I don’t think it’s far fetched to believe it could happen with the Clip too. If you do the tests under the same powerup/shutdown/volume/listening behavior then I don’t think there would be much impact on battery life since you’re treating the Clip the same under both test scenerios. Just my $0.02.
Unfortunately, I can’t test it reliably/accurately with the .20 firmware because it doesn’t show the exact percentage of battery power left(the .29 firmware does). As a Linux user, that information is not available on my computer when I connect the Clip.
@steveg wrote:
Can you do some kind of equivalent test back to back with 01.01.20 and 01.01.29?
Perhaps you could just do the test until the Clip powers off noting the .20 total playing time and then compare this to the total playing time of .29. Since there has been a change in the battery meter levels it probably means you shouldn’t try to compare percentages along the way, just the total playing time. Does this make sense?
Who cares what the percentages are along the way? All that matters is the overall play time. I mean, we’re just trying to determine if FW29 substantially lessens play time, compared to FW20, right?
I just got the Sansa Clip 2gb with FM radio this friday and its worked great so far… Then I got to reading around, seeing that it had firmware updates. Ogg support, yay!
Update to .29, check around and everything seem to work… Except one thing. One of the primary reasons I bought it.
THE **bleep** RADIO WAS RUINED BY THE FIRMWARE UPDATE!!!
Oh it still puts out sound alright. Except now it jumps every even number. So it goes 100.1-100.3-100.5-100.7-100.9-101.1 etc. And guess where many of my favorite radio stations are?
I’ve just bought the 4 gb clip. I love my 2gb one. Flac would be a great addition to this player. It’s large enough to hold quite a few flac albums. I have a couple of other 4gb players that work with flac but the clip is my favorite player currently. Flac plus audible would make this perfect.
Thanks SanDisk for the OGG support on the CLIP! I was just getting ready to give up on OGG and start to use MP3. I’ve always wanted a CLIP, now I can go shopping for one and give away my old MP3 player! Any plans for other SanDisk players to support OGG?
Linux does have support for MTP players, both rythmbox and banshee-1 have MTP player support plugins.
Now, for some reason, they don’t seem to work with sansa clip players, at least in my ubuntu 8.04 home desktop. I’m asking in the ubuntu forums, perhaps there’s a workaround for this.
Also, this is my +1 for FLAC support. Cuesheet + single-file-per-album-Flac support would raise the level of Sansa Clip awesomeness even higher. In the 4G model I bought I could fit 12 full CDs which would be really more than I expected to have anyways.
Tweet, MSC mode is of course supported in Linux, the media player devices are automatically mounted as mass storage USB devices, and you can use the file manager to drop the music.
I see that MTP is also supported, as all most popular music players have an “MTP Player plugin” of some sort. However, I am new to this and haven’t find the way to make the Clip work in MTP mode. Before the Clip I had an iPOD which was also perfectly supported.
For example, see this the below for a reference of MTP in Linux
…apparently a couple of extra libraries are needed to get MTP to work in my default Ubuntu 8.04 desktop. I will give this a try.
The good thing about using MTP with rythmbox and banshee is that if you drag and drop a flac song, they will convert it automatically and on the fly to mp3.
Give me a FLAC I will buy everyone I will give gifts to this year with the 4gb sansaclip if it has flac! come on sansafix! you can do it!!:smileyvery-happy:
Message Edited by RadiatedAnt on 07-08-2008 01:18 PM
So excited about FLAC support! It definitely shows SanDisk wants to make their player the best around, and listens to the customers. Keep it up, guys, and your faithful customers will spread the word.
This clip is an absolute beast. I hooked it up to a monster system at a house party last night to play my mix, after a friend’s laptop died, and it sounded so much better than the same quality audio files on an iPod.
I just hope that the next firmware update let’s you:
Turn off the screen while charging and connected to the PC (just use the regular power-saving settings for this)
Play and navigate through music while charging through USB.
It’s definitely a big frustration not being able to play the thing through AC, and wasting all that battery life, and a bigger frustration to be wasting all your screen life just charging the thing up.
Hello, I was having trouble with my sansa clip mp3 player it would freeze when it would start to refresh, but thank you for your instruction on how to update my firmware it works perfectly, thank you
