I just bought this for my viola-playing daughter. I’m busy I did not know Sansa made lo quality players. Ruining her sense of pitch is a great idea.
She plays viola? Don’t worry, she doesn’t need a sense of pitch anyway (ducks).
Seriously, though, don’t worry about it. If she has absolute pitch, it is already developed and nothing you can do short of a lobotomy will change her ability. If she is very strong here then she might find it uncomfortable, but that’s down to her. Relative pitch perception is unaffected by the actual pitches she listens to. I have very keen pitch perception in certain domains and listening to a reference track I know well, I can feel the difference but it is certainly not significant.
If I do this to avoid the pitch issue, will the resulting files have any more loss or artifacts than I would normally have converting to the same bitrate mp3 or ogg at 44.1khz?
Not unduly. Provided you are above the Nyquist frequency, sample rate conversion does an order of magnitude less damage to the signal than psycho-acoustic compression techniques. For completeness, I would carry out the conversion in FLAC and then compress to MP3 or Vorbis, but in practice I don’t think it would make much difference which you did first.
I see that 48khz is the DAT standard. Do most other mp3 players natively support this by default? What about Windows Media player (using windows 7) or Winamp? Other than Sansa I have an original Ipod with Video 80 Gb media player.
Sampling rate is not really something you “support” as such. Think of it as tape speed - provided your player accepts that kind of tape, you can play it. The question is, does it have a speed control so you can match the playback speed to the record speed? I would suspect WMP and iPod dont and Winamp does, but that is a guess.
Will I take a hit on battery life compared to a file encoded at the same mp3 or ogg bitrate vs 44.1 khz? I know that “ogg is a hog” when it comes to battery life.
No. The whole point of resampling is that the Clip+ won’t even realise there is a difference and so will feed it through at the correct speed (though that said, 44->48kHz does not sound right).
Vorbis is only battery hungry because nobody makes hardware decoders for it - it is actually a more efficient protocol than MP3 in computational terms.
I am not an expert on media, but am I correct in assuming that this would have no relevant effect on IDtag data?
Can’t see why.