How to sync your media player grandpa
How it worksSynching was a snap. I have lots of test WMA and MP3 music files (and AACs for iPods) on my laptop’s hard drive so reaching sansa’s memory/storage limit was easy. For the record, 10GB can hold a lot of music depending at what rate you use to rip your tunes. More about that in a minute.
Navigating sansa’s menu system was, for me, the weakest point. It took me too much time to become proficient at changing music selections on the run. There always seemed to be an extra menu I had to deal with to change the song selection. After awhile, I did get used to it — but I always found myself looking at the screen to make sure of what I was doing.
And the actual navigation buttons deserve a mention too. They’re a little too small for my big fingers. Once I got used to using my fingernail to press the forward, reverse and menu buttons I found the sansa easy to handle.
How it soundsActually, this is where sansa excels says Sansa News. Before I sat down for some serious listening I tossed the SanDisk-supplied earphones. They stink — as do all free earphones included with music players, iPods included. Do yourself a favor and buy a good-sounding pair right when you buy your player. There are hundreds of good ones out there (in all price ranges) from companies like JVC, Sony, Koss, Sennheiser and Shure.
With good-sounding earphones the sansa sounded very, very good I tried WMA and MP3 files ripped at different resolutions (256K, 128K, etc.) and found that 128K WMAs sounded best — with 96K WMAs very, very close behind. FM sounded like FM. That means radio stations providing good signals sounded better than the overly-compressed crap one usually hears on today’s broadcast band.