New Firmware Please, Please, Please

SanDisk MP3 players SanDisk® Clip Sport Go
1

The Clip Sport Go is a great little player especially once you get the equalizer tweaked to your liking.

That said, there are two features that drive me crazy and are really turning me off this player. As a programmer, I know that the fixes would not be very hard to implement.

One - The Shuffle feature is terrible. You get repeats before you hear all the songs on an album or by an artist and not just once or twice. I like to load 3 to 5 albums by an artist and play them on shuffle when I go for a long run. There could be 60 songs but I get repeats in the first 5 or so. Also, the shuffle order often seems to be the same. The programmers need to seed the random number generator with a number that is not a constant.

Two - Album artwork does not show for most files. I gather there are multiple file formats for album artwork and these SanDisk players only recognize one and it is an older format. To fix this yourself you have to find an album artwork editing application and change all the files to the format SanDisk uses. This is very, very tedious and not something you should have to be doing. Sandisk needs to update the firmware so that all formats are recognized, otherwise, don’t say the player displays artwork.

Get working on it, please!

2

The sound quality is very bad when it comes to audio books…   I hate it.

3

Also from me

  • folder player by name without neccessity of using fatsorter

  • playback speed feature

  • remembering the point of listening to the file, AFTER connecting the player to the computer

  • the ability to view files with lowercase letters so that you can see longer names

4

I have just now purchased the Clip Sport Go, and I am astounded that It does not provide an indication of the time in minutes and seconds from the beginning of the file to where the file is currently playing. I have updated the firmware to version 1.04, the latest version, but to no avail. I presume that none of the RockBox firmware versions will work with the Clip Sport Go, so no joy there. I will be using this player mainly for verbal podcasts so the timeline is important to me in case I need to know where in the mp3 file something was said. Does anyone have a solution for this problem?

5

Album (and podcast) artwork not showing is surprising. I have had two previous generations of SanDisk player (Clip+ and Clip Sport). The Clip Sport did not like progressive jpg files but would show everything else that I encountered.

My new Clip Sport Go has stopped showing artwork for podcasts from the BBC but does show artwork for podcasts from Twit.tv. This is a retrograde step as my old Clip Sport shows both.

SanDisk obviously have better code in the older model and need to bring it forward into the firmware for the new model.

Hopefully SanDisk will do this soon. It is badly needed!