SanDisk Developing 128 GB Micro-SD!!!!

You’re right, in a sense, that it becomes a non-issue. I’m just treating you with the same attitude you’ve copping when you cry about being “deceived” by SanDisk, as if their track record as a company could ever support anything similar to that kind of claim.

@marvin_martian wrote:


@aircraftkiller wrote:
You can use it depending on what quality levels you’ve chosen. God forbid you listen to only 2,000 songs instead of 40,000. I can’t imagine how long it must take you to even approach listening to 500 songs in a row, and if you aren’t listening to it all at once then you’ve got little reason to complain - go back to your computer and reload it with the songs you didn’t add, or replace the songs you aren’t as fond of in the player.


That’s a good point…divide the 12,000 songs into 3 folders, and sync-swap as necessary…doesn’t seem like rocket science:wink:

Sorry, guys, but I shouldn’t have to.  The box it came in touts its expandability, with no mention of its limits (and that’s a little misleading, to say the least).

I bought it for a purpose, and it doesn’t achieve that purpose.

Then you should do research before you purchase goods, or look at the words “expandability” a bit closer. Regardless of limits, your player is expandable. That is an accurate advertisement. However, if you bought the Fuze thinking it’d be a replacement for a hard drive player, you’re looking to get gold out of a silver mine. The Fuze wasn’t designed for that kind of functionality. It’s a basic MP3 player with frills.


@aircraftkiller wrote:

Then you should do research before you purchase goods, or look at the words “expandability” a bit closer. Regardless of limits, your player is expandable. That is an accurate advertisement. However, if you bought the Fuze thinking it’d be a replacement for a hard drive player, you’re looking to get gold out of a silver mine. The Fuze wasn’t designed for that kind of functionality. It’s a basic MP3 player with frills.

 


I’ll thank you to refrain from drawing conclusions about my research practices – the due dilgence, as it were, was done – and from any further personal attacks, mild or otherwise.

 

“Expandable” may well be an accurate description, but a misleadingly incomplete one.  The Fuze’s limit is relevant, and should be stated on the packaging.  If that limit were some number that was beyond the ability of today’s memory cards to hold, it would be different, but the commonly available microSD cards of today – a large percentage of which is made by SanDisk itself! – make it easy to exceed the limit even at 256 kbps encoding.  There is simply no reason for prospective buyers to assume they couldn’t fill up a microSD card, pop it in the Fuze and then for it not to play.

 

I will agree with you however that the Fuze is pretty much just a basic MP3 player with frills.  Sadly, I will now agree with you about that.

When “ipods” list their 4,000 song limit on the packaging too, I’ll agree with you. They haven’t, I see no reason why SanDisk should either. If you need more than 4,000 songs, wait for the next firmware update. Either that, or start finding ways to optimize what you listen to. 4,000 songs is roughly 12,000 minutes of playback, call me when you finish that and then we’ll see how urgent getting the other 4,000 is.

Let’s be realistic here.  SanDisk designed the Fuze with the µSD High Capacity card when the cards were at a price point making a super high capacity combination cost-prohibitive.

Simply stated, a device listing at about $100 for the highest capacity unit would double in price with the projected cost of the 8GB card.

Production has made the price of these devices, both the players, and µSD cards, fall significantly.  There’s a colossal market for the µSD cards in mobile phones and cameras, a far larger market than audio players, and we benefit from that.

SanDisk has passed the savings on to us in the new 4 and 8GB Fuzes, and we’ve all seen how reasonable the prices are.

We’re losing sight of the tremendous benefits afforded us in such a great sounding player, in such a small size, with quite impressive capacity both in data storage and hours of playback.  Take one long look at how much you are really getting for the price.  Most impressive.

I for one couldn’t in clear conscience accuse SanDisk of dropping the ball, they’ve simply uncorked the genie!

Nobody would have dared think we’d have such an affordable player with such capacity.  These machines are no slouch either, they’re the first generation of DAPs to actually win the admiration of audiophiles.  They’ve ruffled more than a few feathers.

The problem of the file lookup table was difficult to anticipate, as these machines were designed with a reasonable RAM capacity given the initial design parameters.  The net price of the device had to be kept within reasonable limits, and this decision on SanDisk’s part has been to our collective benefit.

The flash memory of these machines gives us peace of mind, compared against mechanical hard drives.  They’re robust little guys.  And they’ll keep getting better, just wait and see.

Don’t lose sight of the fact that the Sansa gives you tremendous value for the money.  By quality alone, they would be a deal at many times their current price.

Now get those earbuds back on and have a good listen!

Bob  :smileyvery-happy:

@aircraftkiller wrote:
When “ipods” list their 4,000 song limit on the packaging too, I’ll agree with you. They haven’t, I see no reason why SanDisk should either. If you need more than 4,000 songs, wait for the next firmware update. Either that, or start finding ways to optimize what you listen to. 4,000 songs is roughly 12,000 minutes of playback, call me when you finish that and then we’ll see how urgent getting the other 4,000 is.

Whether anyone feels anyone “needs” to carry that many tunes is immaterial, as is what information Apple chooses to disclose in connection with the iPod.

To restate, there is no reason to assume from the packaging or elsewhere that the Fuze has any such limitation.  It is a simple matter to calculate, however, that an 8 GB music player with a 16 GB expansion card holds 16,667 3-minute tracks encoded at 64 kbit/s.  Nowhere is there any indication that, when full, the Fuze can’t play all the tracks it can hold.

I definitely see what you’re saying, but then again, Sandisk doesn’t want to list a limitation that they can raise in the future, but still be stuck with that perceived limitation from now on.  If they had said 4k was the limit, changing the limit to 8k with the new FW wouldn’t change anyone’s perception about the limits of the player.  You can say you were mislead, but I really don’t see that as the case.  It certainly wasn’t SanDisk’s intention to dupe anyone into buying a product that doesn’t do all its advertised to do, they simply didn’t see the possibility of anyone needing more than a 4,000 song database limit at the time of production.  Neither they nor anyone else had any clue how fast flash memory prices would drop, and they had not yet even shown a 16GB microSDHC when these players were made.  I’m sure other flash players have these same limitations, but other than the really high-end ones, you won’t find one larger than 16GB total (most only go up to 8), and precious few of these are expandable.  The SOC that powers our Fuze’s (the AMS AS3525) has its own RAM, so anything more than this would have required a separate module and extra pins on the mainboard, raising the cost and complexity, only to add capabilities that were useless and unforseen at the time of development.  While I understand your frustration, the limit is an understandable issue, and its understandable for Sandisk not to feel the need to mention this.  They never mislead you by quoting a song capacity higher than the limit, it is true that you can add a 32GB card (maybe more) and use all of the space on it, as long as the files will fit in the database.  If you simply needed unlimited storage, you shouldn’t have bought any flash player.  So instead of complaining, you should be happy that you at least have the capability to expand the players memory multiple times beyond its internal capacity, instead of having to ■■■■ it like if you bought a Nano (or nearly anything else, for that matter).

To those who have a larger music library than what can be recognized by the current song limit and feel that SanDisk somehow ‘misled’ you or should have ‘disclosed’ the song limit on the packaging, consider this:

SanDisk has no control over what content, in what format, at what bit-rate you decide to fill up their cards with.

As the fuze also plays video (when you can get it converted right with SMC), a logical suppostion would be that videos would be part of the mix, and the song limit would not be an issue.

These memory cards, while a great boon to mp3 player owners, are in fact used more with cellphones, cameras, etc. We are not the main market or the target audience for them, so in the grand scheme of things, our ‘needs’ are but a fly-speck on the wall as far as the overall marketing of memory cards are concerned.

Although this varies a bit, a lot of car’s speedometers goes up to 120 mph (or used to anyway). Very few, if any will come anywhere close to that ‘limit’. I don’t see this ‘disclosed’ on the window sticker (packaging), nor would I feel I had been cheated or mis-led if I bought it, took it out and could only get it up to 82 mph.

No claims were made as far as how many songs can be placed on the player/card combination and be recognized by the ‘brain’ of the unit. All SanDisk has done is give the public what it wants in these memory cards. More storage in less space. And that’s getting better all the time.

In fact, the 1st post of this thread is about that very subject and what the expectations are for the future. When these ‘ginormous’ cards come out, I’m sure there will be mp3 players (or whatever the format of the day is then) that can utilize the capacity of these cards, and our Fuzes & even the e200’s will still be going strong, but with the same limitations that we have now.

@neutron_bob wrote:

Let’s be realistic here.  SanDisk designed the Fuze with the µSD High Capacity card when the cards were at a price point making a super high capacity combination cost-prohibitive.

 

Simply stated, a device listing at about $100 for the highest capacity unit would double in price with the projected cost of the 8GB card.

 

Production has made the price of these devices, both the players, and µSD cards, fall significantly.  There’s a colossal market for the µSD cards in mobile phones and cameras, a far larger market than audio players, and we benefit from that.

 

SanDisk has passed the savings on to us in the new 4 and 8GB Fuzes, and we’ve all seen how reasonable the prices are.

 

We’re losing sight of the tremendous benefits afforded us in such a great sounding player, in such a small size, with quite impressive capacity both in data storage and hours of playback.  Take one long look at how much you are really getting for the price.  Most impressive.

 

I for one couldn’t in clear conscience accuse SanDisk of dropping the ball, they’ve simply uncorked the genie!

 

Nobody would have dared think we’d have such an affordable player with such capacity.  These machines are no slouch either, they’re the first generation of DAPs to actually win the admiration of audiophiles.  They’ve ruffled more than a few feathers.

 

The problem of the file lookup table was difficult to anticipate, as these machines were designed with a reasonable RAM capacity given the initial design parameters.  The net price of the device had to be kept within reasonable limits, and this decision on SanDisk’s part has been to our collective benefit.

 

The flash memory of these machines gives us peace of mind, compared against mechanical hard drives.  They’re robust little guys.  And they’ll keep getting better, just wait and see.

 

Don’t lose sight of the fact that the Sansa gives you tremendous value for the money.  By quality alone, they would be a deal at many times their current price.

 

Now get those earbuds back on and have a good listen!

 

Bob  :smileyvery-happy:

 

 

Appreciate the reasoned analysis and spirited defense of a product that admittedly has much to love about it, but the bottom line is, though it may have been incomparably wondrous and perfect six months ago, SanDisk has a product on the market today which falls short in a key area today.  Its value is considerable, but its full value is unattainable.

Disclosure would have been nice.

@tapeworm wrote:

 

SanDisk has no control over what content, in what format, at what bit-rate you decide to fill up their cards with.

 

Maybe not, but they knew the maximum number of files it could address.

@dennisqwilson wrote:


@tapeworm wrote:

 

SanDisk has no control over what content, in what format, at what bit-rate you decide to fill up their cards with.

 


Maybe not, but they knew the maximum number of files it could address.

Many of us have told people that were considering the purchase of a Fuze about this limitation, and it seems that quite a few are still buying them. I’m not criticizing your small files,if they work for you that’s great:smiley:… but the Fuze and Clip are a runaway hit with the “audiophile” crowd…the people that have headphones costing hundreds of dollars, and in many cases they routinely rip at a minimum of 192kbps, and the file limit doesn’t come into play for them. If anything, this issue simply proves that you can’t please everyone.:wink:

@marvin_martian wrote:


@dennisqwilson wrote:


@tapeworm wrote:

 

SanDisk has no control over what content, in what format, at what bit-rate you decide to fill up their cards with.

 


Maybe not, but they knew the maximum number of files it could address.


Many of us have told people that were considering the purchase of a Fuze about this limitation, and it seems that quite a few are still buying them. I’m not criticizing your small files,if they work for you that’s great:smiley:… but the Fuze and Clip are a runaway hit with the “audiophile” crowd…the people that have headphones costing hundreds of dollars, and in many cases they routinely rip at a minimum of 192kbps, and the file limit doesn’t come into play for them. If anything, this issue simply proves that you can’t please everyone.:wink:

I have £300 Sennheiser HD650s, Grado SR80s and have just purchased a set of UE super.fi 5s. I’m in the process of building an AMD Beta 22 fully balanced reference level headphone amplifier. I listen to FLAC at home (using my Slim Devices Transporter) and 192kbps Ogg Vorbis on the move. I may not be an audiophile, but I appreciate quality sound and I have hit the 4120 limit of which I was not warned. The file limit very much does come into play for me.

The Fuze isn’t the first DAP to get audiophiles excited. That crown belongs to the Rio Karma, a 5 year old design with 20GB storage and no silly limit.

To those who say SanDisk could not have known that the price/size ratio for flash storage would be as it is today when the Fuze was launched with it’s expansion slot - nonsense. It’s their business to know. They are primarily flash memory manufacturers. When do you think the development programme for 16GB uSD cards started? Don’t you think they are aware of the way the price of storage has consistently dropped over the past 25 years?

To those who say that Sandisk’s primary market for those cards is phones and other devices and that DAP usage is marginal to them, that’s fair enough. But it’s not the card division that stands accused of dropping the ball here. It’s those responsible for the Sansa range, whose primary concern is DAPs, who know of the limit, who are aware of their company’s card product offerings and who choose not to highlight the limit whilst making a virtue of their product’s expandability in a market where 128kbps is a common standard.

The Fuze is a good DAP. It has very good sound quality, a reasonably good UI, a very nice form factor and it seems well put together. I believe Sansa could be honest about the track limit (even stating the intention to increase it), gain credit for their openess and still not harm sales. Why they choose not to seems bizarre to me.

Message Edited by Fifer on 12-12-2008 08:44 AM

@fifer wrote:

 

I believe Sansa could be honest about the track limit (even stating the intention to increase it), gain credit for their openess and still not harm sales. Why they choose not to seems bizarre to me.

Message Edited by Fifer on 12-12-2008 08:44 AM

I agree with almost all of your excellent post, however I differ a bit on the final conclusion. What exactly are they to do – recall all of their shipped/boxed product from retailers and repackage them (or place stickers on them) with a disclaimer about the song limits? At this point, how exactly do they go about making sure that disclosure is known to all prospective/actual buyers before they purchase?

As a secondary matter, I don’t want this issue and dealing with this fallout/bitching etc. to discourage them from including sd expandability in future models. After all, one way to rid themselves of this type of headache is to remove sd slots in the future.

The bottom line is yeah they screwed up a bit. They admit it and are going to increase the limit to a more reasonable 8,000. All in all, that’s good enough for me. Most importantly, I hope they keep making great sounding players and that perhaps a year from now there will be 32gb and maybe 64gb expandable Fuze’s, which will render all of this nonsense about file limits on the 8gb Fuze moot.

Robisan wrote:

 

I agree with almost all of your excellent post, however I differ a bit on the final conclusion. What exactly are they to do – recall all of their shipped/boxed product from retailers and repackage them (or place stickers on them) with a disclaimer about the song limits? At this point, how exactly do they go about making sure that disclosure is known to all prospective/actual buyers before they purchase?

 

As a secondary matter, I don’t want this issue and dealing with this fallout/bitching etc. to discourage them from including sd expandability in future models. After all, one way to rid themselves of this type of headache is to remove sd slots in the future.

 

The bottom line is yeah they screwed up a bit. They admit it and are going to increase the limit to a more reasonable 8,000. All in all, that’s good enough for me. Most importantly, I hope they keep making great sounding players and that perhaps a year from now there will be 32gb and maybe 64gb expandable Fuze’s, which will render all of this nonsense about file limits on the 8gb Fuze moot.

I agree that it would be unreasonable to expect Sansa to recall product or issue stickers, but it wouldn’t be difficult to modify the Fuze specification on the Sansa website (something like: Memory Capacity, 8GB, maximum 4120 tracks*) and (“*4120 track may be increased through future firmware updates” in the small print). I’d suspect that would take the website team 10 minutes. That wouldn’t get to all purchasers, but it’s reasonable to expect someone with a specific requirement to check out the spec on the manufacturer’s website. I did before I purchased. I also read every review I could find. I didn’t discover the limit until I found these forums (after purchase).

I’m not convinced that Sandisk would consider dropping expansion capability. They are primarily a card manufacturer and I think the slotMusic player indicates players which use only memory cards (and no internal memory) as a more likely strategic direction with the attended opportunities for synergy between the two product lines (cards and players). Which is all the more reason for them to get this right now.

I agree partially with your final point. They did screw up, but I don’t believe they really have admitted it. Not publicly, and certainly not outwith these forums as far as I am aware and that’s my real issue.

I just checked the Sansa Fuze spec on the Sansa website and it’s interesting (given the claims on this thread that people shouldn’t base their capacity expectations on low bit rates) that they state “room for up to 2000 songs*. *8GB model. Approximation based on 4-minute songs at 128 kbps MP3.

I don’t understand why you can’t just wait those few hours left to the release of the firmware update and see what that does about the limit.

Because sansafix stated yesterday that the limit was targeted to be fixed Q1 2009? That suggests to me that todays upgrade won’t address the limit (but I’d love to be proved wrong).

@tapeworm wrote:

To those who have a larger music library than what can be recognized by the current song limit and feel that SanDisk somehow ‘misled’ you or should have ‘disclosed’ the song limit on the packaging, consider this:

 

SanDisk has no control over what content, in what format, at what bit-rate you decide to fill up their cards with.

Take a look at ads for hard drives, backup services, expansion cards, etc.  Many of them will say something like, “That’s enough space for xx,xxx songs!” so they are using it as a metric now.  Most people care about the number of songs their player can hold.  I don’t think it is unreasonable to list on the packing that it can hold a certain number of songs.

"To restate, there is no reason to assume from the packaging or elsewhere that the Fuze has any such limitation. It is a simple matter to calculate, however, that an 8 GB music player with a 16 GB expansion card holds 16,667 3-minute tracks encoded at 64 kbit/s. Nowhere is there any indication that, when full, the Fuze can’t play all the tracks it can hold. "

64kbps isn’t a standard though. I can’t think of any music sites that sell music at 64 kbps. I think most now use 192 kbps, and perhaps just a few use 128 kbps. I download lectures that are often between 16 and 32 kbps. I wouldn’t expect a Fuze to be able to access 24 gigs of 16 kbps pocasts, some of which may be under 10 minutes long. Imo it would be reasonable to expect a Fuze to access 24 gigs of 128 kbps music averaging three and a half minutes per song, and with the new 8,000 song limit that will be achieved. Now you know part of the reason that most mp3 players don’t have a card slot. Without a card slot, the design doesn’t need extra capacity to handle whatever card may be put in it. There is no way to anticipate what files someone might use. If a person puts 24 gigs of 16 kbps files averaging a minute each, should the player be required to access them all?

As for the number of songs, it reminds me of food packages and the number of servings per package. Ever read a food package and laugh when an unreasonably large number of servings is listed? A pound box of pasta listing 8 servings? Who makes a pound of pasta to serve 8 people? Imo 2 servings from a pound box of pasta is more reasonable, although some might even say that a pound box of pasta is one serving!

Message Edited by JK98 on 12-12-2008 11:33 AM