I first owned another company’s model of MP3 player called an Eclipse,
which costs only $20. I loaded my MP3 files, ripped using Microsoft
Windows Media Player. I’ve got about 10 various artists, each with
one or two CD albums, from which I ripped just my ‘favorite’ tracks.
Everything worked fine. The only two drawbacks were that the battery
life on one charge was only about maybe two hours. And, it’s
tiny dispay window showed track names only…no images of album
covers. And the super-small font used for track-names was almost
too small to read them, esp for a 70 year old man. :)
So, this Christmas I spent bigger bucks ($40 !?) and got this
SanDisk Clip Sport, 4-GB model.
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Ok, my first issue:
Both the Eclipse and this SanDisk Clip Sport have a very similar
BUTTON LAYOUT…and I find both units very HARD to understand
or think about. Bottom line, so I end up just hitting various buttons
until the right thing happens!
But, whoever came up with this existing triple-use for each button
(or whatever the scheme is ?!), well, I just don’t really understand
it at all! It seems to be ‘context-dependent’…i.e what a button does
seems to depend on where you are now and what OTHER button
you pressed before getting here.
It took me 10 minutes of randomly pressing buttons, before I finally
notice that there is also an FM radio inside (that I don’t plan to use).
And, something about ‘books’ and other goofy stuff I’ll also never
use.
And, I see no real IN-CONTEXT documentation or use-cases or
whatever anywhere! Yikes! What were they thinking???
Seems like some variant of 'reverse-Polish-notation!
What am I missing?
Ok, I finally learned there is some internal operation, now
that my MP3 files are loaded, to create ‘playlists’. So, is
there CLEAR documentation somewhere on what buttons
to press, and in what order, to create a playlist?
[I really didn’t want to HAVE to create playlists…I would have
been happy to just choose ‘random’ and/or ‘shuffle’, and have
it move thru my various files. But, I’m not convinced that that
is working as they (hopefully) intended.
Ok, what am I still missing?
Just call me “Totally Confused”.