I love my Sansa Express. Even though it died.

First I should say thank you to Sandisk.  I’ve been waiting forever for a company to create an affordable MP3 player that has an FM tuner, removable memory card reader, sufficient onboard storage, a USB flash drive form factor, an LCD screen, MP3-WMA-Audible playback, high quality recording, an integrated lanyard, and a compact design.  When I say I’ve been waiting forever I mean 5 years.  So kudos to you.  It also helps that you’ve got a strong brand name to back up this product.  I am so tired of people prattling on about how great the iPod is.  The Shuffle doesn’t hold a candle to the Sansa Express.  That said I must admit that after 2.5 months of fairly regular use my Sansa Express died.  I would turn the device on and see the Sandisk logo appear for about 3 seconds and then it would turn off never to be heard from again.  I called the pleasant folks on the support line and had a nice conversation with them at the end of which they reccomended I return the device to BestBuy.  I was pretty skeptical because I had not purchased any service plan and I was well over my 30 day return policy but I took their advice and went there today.  It was a very pleasantly suprised when the BestBuy service rep at the counter promptly told me I could go pick out a new one and exchange it for manufacturer’s warranty fulfillment.  I did so and I have a new Sansa Express which is working great so far.  It seems that this cool little device is still in a 1.0 version so there are some bugs to work out but that’s to be expected.   Here are the pluses and the minuses to date.  I hope any minuses can be fixed with a firmware update because the Express really fits my needs.  The playback sound is excellent and reliably restarts playback where I left off when I turn off the device.  The recording quality is good and I’ve used it extensively.  The only problem with recording is that the firmware sometimes locks me into the recording menu and I can’t get out without a hard reset. The onboard storage is sufficient for a few podcasts.  The MicroSD card reader gives me problems reading a 1GB MicroSD card.  I’ve had some issues with the device recognizing the MiroSD card.  The Express is light and works well when I use it to excerise.  I typically drag and drop my files using Windows explorer and the USB 2.0 interface is very quick when making the transfer.  As I said, I hope any problems I’ve identified can be fixed with firmware.  Thanks for making a great product.

Hello R08808, welcome to the SanDisk Sansa Community.

I am glad you have had a positive experience with the Express and gave it another try despite a failure with the first.

I use my Express on a regular basis and have not experienced being stuck on Record. When I go to Record, I can start a recording by hitting play, pause by hitting play again. I can save the voice recording by hitting the middle button and selecting save, or I can cancel the recording by hitting middle button and selecting cancel. As long as the player isn’t recording (It should say 0:00 Ready), you should be able to hit the Menu button to go back to the main menu.

Regarding the MicroSD, it should be available when you double click on the Express and you’ll see an option for “Internal Memory” and “Expansion Card”. From there I could add and delete from the MicroSD as if it was a normal card. This was tested on a Windows XP SP2/WMP11 machine and Windows Vista WMP11 machines.

Have you already updated the firmware on your player?

The Sansa Firmware Updater can be downloaded from the link below.

Sansa Firmware Updater

Message Edited by LagunaSansa on 07-30-2007 08:38 AM

I will admit it’s a nice piece of equipment BUT–

I’m on my 4th one in 3 weeks. They will not stay running.

The first one was corrupted by the updater. Wouldn’t reboot afterwards.

The second one I aborted out of the update and removed the updater when I saw

the same error occuring. A reset fixed the Sansa but it died the next day for some other reason.

Note;

The updater stays on your computer and watches for the Sansa so if it is the problem

every Sansa plugged in will be attacked. It needs to be uninstalled.

The third one lasted a week. I got about 3/4 gig of music installed and then it gagged. Reset won’t do anything

The screen shows the dog for about 2 seconds when you hit menu The first time only.

Then a reset will get it to do that again.

I’m going for the 4th unit now. I will call tech support but this is crazy.

SanDisk management needs to read the posts and ask the techs how many of these things fail. They have a problem and not admitting it will cause us all to be wary of the SanDisk name as just another piece of cheap Chinese junk.