I’m not a heavy user of portable music players. I like to listen to music the old-fashioned way: at home, in front of the speakers of my stereo system, not only hearing the music but feeling its vibrations through the floor and the air. Short of hearing it live, this seems like the most natural way of listening to music. However, when traveling or when out and about for long periods, it is certainly nice to be able to bring along some music to make the time go more pleasantly. Until recently, this occasional need was satisfied by an old Creative Zen V Plus 2GB MP3 player. It accompanied my wife and me on various trips for years, but lately has been erratically refusing to play when called upon to do so. It was time to send it to the farm where they keep the old carriage horses and those turkeys spared by presidents through the ages.
My criteria for a replacement MP3 player were simple: it needed to be low-cost and reliable. I’m not an Apple aficionado, and an iPod would be a case of extreme over-buying for my needs. I wanted something under $50. The “SanDisk Sansa Clip+” player which I settled upon is listed at $49.99 but can currently be found on Amazon
for $34.95, and perhaps even less elsewhere.
The model I purchased has a 4GB capacity. It surprised me that this was only twice as much capacity as the old Creative Zen, considering how such things have changed in the computing world, but when I received it and saw that it was also less than half the size of that old player, this made more sense. It is 2 inches long and 1 1/4 inches wide, and about as small as such a player could be and still have a readable screen and manageable controls. Anyhow, 4GB is plenty for my own purposes. For those who care to do so, SanDisk microSD or microSDHC cards can be utilized to expand the capacity by many gigabytes. It is also designed to accept a “slotRadio” card, the nature of which interests me not a bit. Continue reading “SanDisk Sansa Clip MP3 Player (4GB)”