Should the bitrate for recording from FM really be that high?

SanDisk MP3 players Sansa® Clip | Sansa® Clip+
1

So I bought a 1 GB clip and I love it.  It has all the features I need in an mp3 player but I noticed that the amount of information required for FM recording is outrageous!  The clip records from the radio at 768 Kbits/s!  That’s much higher than any of the mp3s on my computer, which top out at 320 Kbits/s.  Should it really be this high or was this a slip-up by Sandisk? 

I can imagine a programmer putting in 96 KBytes/s rather than 96 Kbits/s!  Could this fixed in a firmware update?

2

i believe it’s in uncompressed wav format, so it is correct.  you can compress it if you like to significantly less, but you will lose some quality.  the clip probably doesn’t have the ability to encode itself on such a small device.

3

Thats good to know that it’s probably a hardware limitation.  You said that the Clip’s so small so it probably doesn’t have the ability to encode the files.  Do the larger Sansa or any other mp3 player do that to your knowledge? 

Regardless, if I really wanna keep the recording I can just transfer it and compress with PowerAmpDB…

4

it aint the hardware. its all about licensing for the rights

5

Not sure about any of the Sansa models, but there are other MP3 players that will record FM to MP3, including the Cowon iAudio G3.