Sansa® Fuze™

[kennynd]

Hello. My wife has a Sansa Fuze which she loves dearly and uses for audiobooks mostly. Over time, possibly due to drops, it has developed a loose connection ie. one channel(ear) goes out from time to time. There is a small gap near the bottom of the case. When the case is squeezed the problem seems to go away. The question is-should I try to put a drop of glue in the gap and then clamp it or do you think this might cause the demise of the player somehow?

This leads to my next question-which of the current Sansa models might handle audiobooks the best? Screen size, ease of use including auto-resume are important to her.

Thanks in advance for your help

[JK98]

Get the Clip Zip for the next player, especially if the audiobooks are protected WMA.

The  Clip Sport doesn't support protected WMA. The only protected files it supports are Audible ones.

[kennynd]

Thanks for your reply.My lone source of audiobooks is the public library. Would your recommendation still apply? Why do you pick that model over the others? Thanks again for helping.

[JK98]

What types of files does your library have? I think most libraries use protected WMA????? I don't use audiobooks.

[kennynd]

Library(and commercial) audiobooks are cd's.(I haven't downloaded files as yet). I rip them to my hd using Roxio or Nero- whichever recognizes the artist and title. I can rip into either mp3 or wma format.

[JK98]

If the source is  CD, then I suggest making 32kbps mp3 mono files. This is the bitrate I use for spoken word files. I find that using a bitrate higher than this doesn't improve sound quality much for spoken word files, and gives larger files. Not only does using a lower bitrate save space, it also gives longer battery life on the player. 

Sandisk players get much longer battery life playing mp3 files than WMA files. 

Not only will  using mono give you better sound quality for the same file size. When a speaker is moving around while speaking, listening in stereo might give you a dizzy feeling.

[Black-Rectangle]

AFAIK, auto-resume (bookmarking) is the same in all Sansa players.Make sure the tag in the audiobook files says Audiobook, and that should enable bookmarking for those files.

Mp3Tag, free software

http://www.mp3tag.de/en/

is a great tag editor.

If the library is giving you actual CDs, good for them.

Use any ripper available--including iTunes, if you go into Edit/Preferences/Advanced/General/Importing Settings and change it to mp3--to rip to .mp3. Any  bitrate,  32 or 64 or 128, is fine for audiobooks.

Then Import  to your computer or hard drive and send the ripped files over to the Sansa.

The channel dropout on the earphones is more difficult. If it is a physical problem with the headphone connection there's really nothing to be done but replace the player--they are too inexpensive to repair.Get a refurbished Clip through Amazon.