SanDisk Sansa

I miss good mp3 player days. I started on iriver cd player that could read MP3s... once i had some spare money upgraded to iriver H10 wit 20GB spinning rust drive (still have it, still working, sitting in the drawer). Once tried an old ipod, to see what the hassle, learned the pain of loading my own music to it, and the lack of file browser on it, no i dont want that artist/album BS, got my own categorized collection. Sold that one quickly. Sandisk sansa with rockbox was spot on, both both units failed like a year from time i bought them. Currently using an old old heavy duty samsung xcover2, with cyanogen mod, it does not have a simcard just 128gb microsd with lots of music on it. DAC is reasonably good on it and it plays FLAC no problem. Doubles as offline GPS with osmAnd maps loaded in.

I loved my SanDisk Sansa. It had a specific category for audiobooks, and there were a lot of quality of life things - features that wouldn’t matter when you were listening to songs but that made listening to books on tape way better. - If you held the fast forward button it would slowly increase the speed it fast forwarded. Not something that matters with a 2 minute song, but it really matters with an hour long audiobook section. - If you went to listen to something else but then you came back to the audiobook, it would open with the section you’d been listening to highlighted, and if you selected it it would pick up where you’d left off. If you accidentally skipped forward you could back out, move back to the previous section, and it’d do the same thing - starting where you’d been. - On top of that, you could add more storage with microSD cards!

I was expecting to see them say "it runs Rockbox." I put it on my Sandisk E200 back in the day; 2Gb and then I stuck in another 2Gb card. It was so responsive, and the scroll-wheel UI was so convenient. The wheel seized up (still usable, but had to turn it like a safecracker instead of with your thumb), so I gifted it to a co-worker's son. What I always wanted to see was something with an "old Blackberry" style side-mounted scroll-wheel, for eyes-off operation.

Yeah, the Clip+ with Rockbox was just incredible. Got me through a lot of workdays in the corporate "no software allowed on your computer" days. I was using mine in the very early days of Android existing. Some people had them, but I didn't yet. I got my first Android phone, moved my music over, and was ... massively disappointed. My favorite phone incident was sitting on some flight, trying to listen to music, and my phone wouldn't play it through the headphones, speakers only, annoying everyone nearby. I didn't listen to music on that flight and promptly switched back to a device that did not have a physical speaker. Over time, phones rebuilt trust and I got a lot of use out of that, until Google Play Music got shut down and deleted all my music (no problem, I have it all locally). Now I have no idea what people do and simply go without. I guess people don't have music libraries any more and just listen to the radio for $10/month? No thanks. (I use foobar2000 on my desktop, and don't listen to music away from my home anymore. Thanks technological progress?)

I loved my Sansa back in the days when I still had a flip phone. Now that my phone has everything including unlimited* data and I'm going to carry my phone on a run anyway it doesn't really serve a purpose for me anymore. I will always carry fond memories of it getting me through some long, dark early morning runs.