- Average user rating: 3.5 stars out of 19 reviews Back to product review
- My rating: 0 stars
Full user review
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10 out of 10 people found this review helpful
3.0 stars
"Great for music but audiobook feature unusable"
Pros: Great features for playing mp3 music and radio
Cons: Multiple features complicate usability
Summary: In most respects, the Sansa Fuze is a great mp3 player. And the audiobook feature is a great idea. However the implementation of this feature is so badly broken that the feature is unusable.
Problem 1 - It sorts track numbers incorrectly, putting tracks 1-9 at the bottom of the list.
Problem 2- It is difficult to navigate between tracks. The buttons do not function as they do for music.
Problem 3 - It automatically leaves bookmarks in the middle of files and then skips to the bookmark. If you lose your place and search a file and then go back and find your place in the previous file, when it gets to the end of that file, it jumps to where you last played the next file. This problem is exacerbated by Problem 2.
I had to resort to using the music folder for audiobooks. If Sansa can provide a firmware fix for these problems, the Fuze would make an excellent player for listening to audiobooks.
I encountered one other gatcha with the USB mode in the System Settings, which lets you select MTP or MSC. I had no idea what either of these were and none of the documentation from Sansa had any information about what these acronyms stand for or why I would want to choose one or the other. The default is Auto Detect, whatever that means. What I found is that it didn't work very well with the Windows file system. You only need to use the MTP setting if you have music with DRM (digital rights management). If you don't have music with DRM, you will want to change this setting to MSC. But before you do that, you might want to connect the device and delete any files you don't want to use. When you connected in MSC mode, your computer can't see the files that were loaded in MTP mode.
- 1 reply to this review
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"Audiobook" refers to the file format. In this case, Audible.com's .aa format, or the .m4b format that iTunes uses.
When you rip your audiobooks from CD to MP3/WMA/AAC, then you'lll get in music-style tracks (1-9, etc). If that's the case, then you are better off with to treat them as music files, as you've discovered.
The advantages of the audiobook format include (1) one to four (two is typical) files, instead of dozens to hundreds; (2) the bookmarking-within-file feature that stinks with three minute tracks suddenly works a whole lot better; (3) file size is often substantially smaller, if you convert the audio files at 32-64 kbps.
If you've ripped the audiobooks yourself from CD, you can create an audiobook using "mp3 to iPod audiobook converter" (do a google search on what's in the quotes to find it). Or you can pick up an Audible subscription and just grab the final result. (I've got hundreds; I'm addicted to Audible.)
Where to buy
SanDisk Sansa Fuze (2GB, black):
$34.99 - $87.95
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$64.99 | Yes |
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