slotRadio on Sansa Fuze!

MP3 players Sansa Fuze
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@neutron_bob: is it true the moderators here don’t enforce staying on topic? I’ll only reply that an album over 30 years ago retails for the same as one now. If your wage stayed the same over that period let us know. I’m an accountant. There’s been general inflation during that period.

It would be interesting to clone the card and yet all we’d end up with is a card with secure music stored in a proprietary file system. I don’t think it’s going to be possible to add anything to that sealed-off container which uses most the capacity of the card.

I was much happier with the SR card at $40 than seeing it now at $50. I won’t soon get another, since the selection of genres is too limited.

Message Edited by shelded on 10-18-2009 01:42 PM

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I eagerly await more genres for the SR lineup, like Jazz.

The SR card only has about 64MB open for additional music, as it’s pretty filled up.

As an accountant, I’m sure you’ll appreciate the dramatic increase in margin, despite inflation, even for the venerable CD…much less downloads.  I began my CD collection with the first available CDs, at $24 each, in 1982 dollars.  SlotRadio is a good deal per track, as a handy song mix.

Bob  :smileyvery-happy:

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@neutron_bob: Jazz card would be great, but it scares me what variety would be there, just as “classical” is sure to be such a mixture of good and bad. I was interested to see they have a health and fitness one which has some decent music on it if you can stand mono-tempo :slight_smile:

I suppose you know, margin is what profit remains after selling and paying one’s costs. What I do “appreciate” is that there has been a _decrease in unit margin due to decreased sales price and increased unit costs. _I think you underestimate the delivery costs of the digital media and that it costs more than that 27-yr-old CD did; however, I think we both are speaking out of ignorance. There is an awful amount of debate nowadays about what it costs to provide a megabyte to a user. The slotradio SD card is, I think, a fairly expensive cost of production.

Did someone around here say they would not mind paying an extra ten bucks for these things? They launched at a pretty good price, and I find it impossible to believe they sold so well that the Sansa ppl decided they could shove the price higher. Well, I can outwait them for the price to fall again.

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I think it did go back to $39.99 - and - there’s a new Sony Music Classical card too! :slight_smile:

Message Edited by Sansational on 10-28-2009 12:01 AM

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I added SlotRadio to my Sansa Fuse a while ago (easy to do, and it works great).  The first card I put in was the Oldies card.  My family thought it would be a great idea to give me cards for birthday presents, so I have Oldies, Country, 70s-80s Rock and Classic rock.

You probably know this, but when I take out a card and replace it with another, then put the other card back in - - it starts where it left off.  I thought it would start over, and I’d be playing the first songs on the cards over and over.

I would also like a Jazz card, a Classical, and a Standards (Sinatra, Miller, Etta James) card.

I actually like the random mix.  When I want specific music, I have everything on my computer and paste it into a micro SD card.

Don’t mean to be babbling on, I just really like the convenience of random music that I don’t have to spend hours creating.

Great product.

Ed

Message Edited by edgraham on 11-13-2009 09:10 AM

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@Sensational: Thank you, I’ve found on Rip Shack and on slotradio.com that the cards are $40 again. When you posted a few weeks ago that change had not hit the web sites. Some cards were $50, mostly the new ones.

So, I guess we have out-waited them. You all may resume buying the cards now. :slight_smile:

I have not yet made it entirely through every track on my Rock card, and I have heard the 2-second “ad” twice, once on each of two tracks. This silly card stays in the player almost all the time instead of my 8GB personal collection because it is so simple. Not because I love every tune, but because it’s “good enough.”

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shelded wrote:

@Sensational: Thank you, I’ve found on Rip Shack and on slotradio.com that the cards are $40 again. When you posted a few weeks ago that change had not hit the web sites. Some cards were $50, mostly the new ones.

 

So, I guess we have out-waited them. You all may resume buying the cards now. :slight_smile:

 

I have not yet made it entirely through every track on my Rock card, and I have heard the 2-second “ad” twice, once on each of two tracks. This silly card stays in the player almost all the time instead of my 8GB personal collection because it is so simple. Not because I love every tune, but because it’s “good enough.”

On the “Good Enough” revolution, from Wired Magazine:

http://www.wired.com/gadgets/miscellaneous/magazine/17-09/ff_goodenough

Interesting read.

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Thanks for the Good enough article.  I worked on the First Flip Video while I was at Pure Digital,  FYI.

  

The nice thing about the tech is that the good enough becomes really good given time, cost reduction, and effort to improve by smart engineers.

Newest Flip Video Mino is awesome. 

Cheers,  SansaFix 

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So. How do I get the SlotRadio icon off of the dock? It’s a rhetorical question. Nevertheless, I didn’t buy an MP3 player to have something marketed towards me.

/transitions to Zune

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It’s interesting to read how many think a music player would be unwanted if it didn’t allow you to choose the tracks, or to go back. I know I don’t like the idea of the iPod Shuffle, but I see plenty of coworkers using these, as well as folks at the gym.

For myself, I prefer the Fuze, but my SO just wants me to load up music for the car or for long morning walks. As has been noted, most on this forum are not the intended buyers of slotRadio, but for those who don’t want to mess with software and who don’t want to rely on others to fill their microSD needs, these cards and players might be just the thing.

It takes me time and effort to fill the 8GB of a Fuze with hits of a particular era, and I’m glad that there are websites listing such things so I can put the music together. I own more compilation CDs than is probably good for a person, and I’m thinking about reflashing one of the Fuzes and enabling the slotRadio icon, so she can give the cards a try…

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As an admittedly middle-aged engineer and an educator, I think I’m pretty tech-savvy and love my tech-toys.  I’m also very busy, as a mom of two under-12s, with one more-than-full-time job, and an Inc.-rated-fast-growing company on the side.  I do love my Fuze, but time to download and organize music is limited.  

Solution 1:  hire my very musical future “robot scientist”  11-year-old to rip all my albums and download my other favorites.  She uses the proceeds to load her own Fuze.  She even gave me 20 free album rips as a Christmas present.  : )  

Solution 2:  slotRadio–think of it as better and portable elevator music.  Just the right background music when I plug in my noise-cancelling headphones and concentrate, or when I find time to hit the gym.  The mix is actually much better than I expected.  While a percentage of songs are those I wouldn’t want to buy at a greater price, I enjoy having them come up once in a while.  And none of the annoying radio chatter or ads.  At this moment, I have the oldies on (Beach Boys, Help Me, Rhonda) while I catch up on Sunday-morning e-mails and FB on my netbook, while debugging a program for work on another computer, and checking in occasionally on the kids’ progress in cooking breakfast.  Now where can I send my requests for new card themes?

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does anyone know what the " STANZAV010118.bin" file is on the slotRadio cards?

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NYCasphaltSurfr wrote:

 

does anyone know what the " STANZAV010118.bin" file is on the slotRadio cards?

 

 

it is a firmware upgrade for the slotRadio player. if you have a Fuze it is not needed and can be deleted.  

Message Edited by drlucky on 01-26-2010 02:05 PM

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I’m pretty sure this hasn’t been mentioned yet, but I think it’s a viable alternative to slotRadio. I’ve been using Rhapsody To Go with my Fuze, and the feature that I probably use most often is transferring radio channels to my player. When you do this, Rhapsody transfers 3-4 hours of music from the channel to your Fuze player. The channels themselves are completely user-configurable.  Each artist’s page has a radio channel that has that artist and similar artists.  You can also create a completely customized channel, or let Rhapsody make one for you.  It’s a good way do discover new artists and find ones that you’d forgotten.  Granted, you never actually own the music files, and this service costs about $15 per month.  I think it’s worth it, and I’m impressed with how well the whole service works with the Fuze.

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Radio Shack is having a special on the Slot Radio cards this week: $29.95. Now, I’m all about loading my own music and making my own playlists, and I’m the first to cry “foul” when a company tells me I can’t do what I want with MY music, but you have to admit this is a great deal for 1,000 songs.

As someone else pointed out, you don’t have control over what songs are on it, but it’s the same as listening to a radio station…except you have the choice to “skip” when you don’t like the song…and no ads of course. I may give the “Oldies” card a shot as it’s one of the few playlists I don’t currently have.

===============

Sansa Fuze 4gb

Sansa Clip 2gb x 4

Sansa Shaker (gave it away to my niece)

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At Radio Shack (Rip Shack) I’ve bought two cards at $40, so $30 sounds great to me. Each time, I’ve gotten a $10 coupon toward my next purchase by completing a survey. If you need a second thing from RS before they expire you might buy something cheap first, do the survey, then buy the card with the coupon … I did not.

The songs on these cards are ripped at 128bit, according to the file info I find using the Fuze. The file info is available in the audiobooks section, not the music section when using the SR cards. I can hear the diff in quality, but since most the old rock was junk anyway, there’s little loss IMO. These cards work fine for background noise while you exercise, work in the yard, paint the dining room, wait for the kids at school, or to give others a taste of the old music.

The Health and Fitness card I got my wife is only palatable for that purpose, IMO, since the consistent beat from song to song drives me batty. Listen to the Cardio track: did someone modify these songs or did they really sound this way? I could only take a few minutes, but it’s just what wife needs.

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Sandisk might be discontinuing the Slotmusic cards and replacing them with Slotmusic+ cards. The Slotmusic+ cards are basically the same as the Slotmusic cards, except that they have 4 GB of free space where you can put your own songs.

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shelded wrote:

. . . but since most the old rock was junk anyway, there’s little loss IMO.

Heyyyy! Old rock was (& still is) THE rock. What passes for ‘rock’ these days wouldn’t make a decent pimple on Gene Simmon’s, Ted Nugent’s, or Sammy Haggar’s butt! :dizzy_face:

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Well, I was too curious and took advantage of the $29.95 sale of slotRadio at Radio Shack and bought one (Oldies).  And am I surprised!  I was always skeptical of this concept because you can’t store the music anywhere else and you can’t rewind the music (you can pause and go forward).  But, it does in fact play like a radio!  And it does takes me down memory lane.  I actually found that I have no interest in storing the music anywhere else, because all the songs have already been played in my head a hundred times anyway.  And if I REALLY wanted to have a copy, I can always buy it at Amazon.  It sometimes play songs which I’ve forgotten or haven’t heard for a long time.  But, there are also some songs that I don’t care much for, so I just skip them.

So, it plays like a radio (but I can pause it, and there are no commercials).  For that, I think it’s worth 3 cents a song.  I also think that if I didn’t know the majority of the songs, I wouldn’t buy it.  Listening to old songs is fun.  I’ll probably be using this mostly as background music at work.  

If you’re thinking of buying one, it’s categorized into seven playlists (love songs, rock oldies, country oldies, R&B oldies, pop oldies, motor city (motown), and jukebox (which seems to be their miscellaneous).  You get to jump from playlist to playlist.  And it will resume the music that was playing in that playlist.  I haven’t gotten to the end of a playlist yet, so I don’t know if it would stop or loop.  Oh, and you’re not stuck with the radio, you can always go back to Music, Video or FM mode on your player.  

So, surprisingly, I’m enjoying this slotRadio!  I think for 3 cents a song, you can’t really go wrong…  and it’s kinda fun!

Update:  I’ve listened to quite a few songs now.  Some selections are good, some are not.  I like the fact that you can switch playlists.  The lower button for “Next” is a little confusing, because that’s usually the button for menu.   I’d say 15% of the songs are recogniziably good, 80% are so-so, and 5% are just filler songs.  Regardless, it’s still good as background music.

By the way, for those who like this kind of concept, try Pandora.com.  It’s really a continuous playlist radio station on the internet, except that it plays music on a relational basis – and it’s free.  Once you select your kind of music, it just keeps on going.  Their selections are pretty good.

ggin1
Message Edited by ggin1 on 02-26-2010 02:28 PM

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Does anyone know if the new slotRadio+ cards ( http://slotradio.com/mobile ) work in the Sansa Fuze and/or Clip+?