Shown above is my black Sansa Clip Zip + music player. It has 4 GB of built-in storage, and takes micro SD cards. By itself it's an okay music player, but it's real strength is that it's one of a number of digital music players whose firmware can be easily replaced with a third-party, opensource firmware called Rockbox. Many people would say that a Sansa running Rockbox is better than an iPod:
- Four GB Sansa Clip Zip +, costs under $40 CDN
- Expandable capacity via SD card slot
- Rockbox is free!
Rockboxed Sansa Clip Zip plus can:
- Play Real Audio, all the MPEG flavours (like mp1 to 3), AAC (such as m4a, mp4), ogg/vorbis, flac, aif, Sony Audio, Windows Media audio, and lots more!
- Open jpeg images, and txt files
- Play games, including Doom
- Do an iPod-like cover view
- Create playlists on-the-fly
One favourite Rockbox functionality for me is the fast-forward; it speeds up the longer you hold it down!
Rockbox is almost too configurable, in both look and sound. There are walk-through installers for Windows, Mac, and Linux, The site offers a wealth of information including which players are supported. If there is a drawback it is that the supported players are older hardware, and increasingly hard to find; the SCZ+ is one of the newest players supported.
The Black SCZ+ shown above was a replacement for a white model which was rendered read-only one day. I attribute this not to the player but to Linux/Ubuntu, as I've had this happen permanently to a micro-SD card, and temporarily to an external hard drive. I managed to restore the micro-SD by getting an SD card-size adapter, which had the physical switch to toggle write-protect on and off. I have also managed to un-bork the white SCZ+ by reformatting it on a Mac which naturally still saw it as write-enabled.
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