SanDisk Sansa m240 (1GB, silver)

Pros: Price, Size/Look, Features, Ease of Use, Storage Capacity, Support

Cons: Could have better carrying options, playlist feature incomplete

Summary: I love this player. It plays both MP3 and WMA, has digital FM, and voice recording. The box says that it gets 17 hours or playtime off of one AAA battery, but I think that number is actually low. The 1GB storage capacity is plenty for my needs, and the price versus comparable players is very reasonable ($119 retail).

That said I do have two minor complaints. First, a better carrying option could've have been provided. Out of box, the player comes with a clear protective case and an arm band. Other players in this class come with belt clips or keyrings, which would have worked better for me. I improvised a bit and attached a caribinger style belt clip to the loop on the case meant for the arm band to go through.

Second, I was able to figure out virtually all the features on the player without instruction. But adding playlists escaped me. I checked the documentation, both the quickstart booklet and the more extensive user guide (only on the included CD or from the Sandisk website). Both of which seemed to curiously lack any documentation on playlist functionality. I eventually ended up calling support. The initial tech I talked to was unfamiliar with the m240, but he made a glowing effort, asking many other techs and suggesting ideas. When nothing worked, he referred me to corporate. I had to leave a message with the Application Development Group there, but I got a call back the next day. The person I talked to was very knowledgeable, and was able to provide me with a couple of workable, though not very intuitive solutions. It appears that the playlist functionality of this device is not fully developed yet. You can however sort of get around it by either using Real's Rhapsody player or dragging .m3u (Winamp-style playlists) onto the device in MSC mode (won't work in MTP).

With Rhapsody, create a playlist in Rhapsody, add all the files you would like to the playlist and then drag the playlist onto the sansa m240 player icon in the folder-tree on the left. This is important. Rhapsody will ONLY transfer the playlist itself when it is physically dragged onto the device icon. Simply dragging the playlist to the transfer box will not work. The only problem with this approach is that once you've added the playlists, it's difficult to remove them. The only way I was able to remove playlists added in this way was to physically delete the Playlist folder that gets created, but this deletes all the playlists on the device. So basically you can't remove an individual playlist.

With .m3u files, you first need to make sure that the device is in MSC mode. Go to the menu, scroll and select Settings, scroll and select USB, and choose MSC. Create a playlist in Winamp and save it, but not to the device yet. Before adding it to the device, you must edit the .m3u file in a text editor and remove all the absolute paths, leaving just the filenames. Leave everything else in the .m3u file as it is. Save and then move to the root directory of the device. The problem with this method is that all the media files must be transferred in MSC mode as well. So no automatic synching. This also rules out subscription music (which must be transferred in MTP). This is only for playlists though. The player itself reads both modes (MSC and MTP) at the same time, so any files added in either mode can be played on the device without have to switch between modes.

This might sound like a bad problem, but it's really not. I've found that playlists aren't really that necessary. The device automatically sorts your music by artist, album, and genre. So you can easily play everything by a single artist, only items from a particular album or just rock, rap, or whatever. Plus, there is a special playlist called favorites that does work, and lets you add up to 30 songs at a time. Additionally, the beauty about a flash memory device like this is that the firmware can be updated any time adding new features or fixing problems. So a month from now, playlist functionality may work perfectly via a firmware update. The word from the development group is that an XML-based playlist functionality is being worked on.