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Topic: Replacement for Sansa Clip+? (Read 6632 times) previous topic - next topic
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Replacement for Sansa Clip+?

My Sansa Clip+ has died: no screen, sound or USB activity. Bit disappointing after only 18 months but otherwise I have been rather pleased with it. Before buying another one I thought I would ask the forum if there is anything better around with a similar spec: good software, small to carry when exercising, decent battery life, cheap, screen size/quality unimportant,...

Replacement for Sansa Clip+?

Reply #1 –
Short answer: no. There's nothing as good as the Clip when it comes to the criteria you mentioned - exept for a Clip with rockbox.

Replacement for Sansa Clip+?

Reply #2 –
Quote from: honestguv on
My Sansa Clip+ has died: no screen, sound or USB activity.


Assuming you didn't smash it or something, its possible it just crashed with the screen turned off.  Hold power for a while, or even just let the battery run down and then try plugging it back into USB and see if it reboots.

Replacement for Sansa Clip+?

Reply #3 –
Quote from: saratoga on
Assuming you didn't smash it or something, its possible it just crashed with the screen turned off.  Hold power for a while, or even just let the battery run down and then try plugging it back into USB and see if it reboots.

Thanks a lot for the tip. Holding the power button longer than normal did result in it coming it to life. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately if the problem repeats, I had already ordered another one.

Replacement for Sansa Clip+?

Reply #4 –
Quote from: honestguv on
Thanks a lot for the tip. Holding the power button longer than normal did result in it coming it to life. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately if the problem repeats, I had already ordered another one.

Some QuickTime-encoded HE-AAC -files got my Clip+ to "die" this way mid-song. I got my Clip working again after the battery was exhausted (didn't know about long-press of the power button back then).

Just saying that it is possible for a defective file to kill Clip this way.

Replacement for Sansa Clip+?

Reply #5 –
Quote from: Cron on
Some QuickTime-encoded HE-AAC -files got my Clip+ to "die" this way mid-song. I got my Clip working again after the battery was exhausted (didn't know about long-press of the power button back then).

Just saying that it is possible for a defective file to kill Clip this way.

In my case it also died part way through a track but it was one that had been played quite a few times before. I have just played it again to check and it was fine. Don't know the cause.

Replacement for Sansa Clip+?

Reply #6 –
Quote from: Cron on
Just saying that it is possible for a defective file to kill Clip this way.


Of course.  A bad, unexpected or corrupted media file can crash virtually any media player if you're unlucky enough.  But it doesn't kill the player, you just need to reboot.

Replacement for Sansa Clip+?

Reply #7 –
Yes, the way the Clip crashes sometimes to a "coma" can one easily lead to the assumption that it's dead. I wonder why Sansa implemented that "10 second reset". If they made it easier to reset the Clip they'd proably avoided thousands of guarantee cases.

Btw. - I didn't experience such crashes anymore on my Clip+ with recent rockbox builds, only with OF or older rockbox builds.

Replacement for Sansa Clip+?

Reply #8 –
Quote from: saratoga on
Of course.  A bad, unexpected or corrupted media file can crash virtually any media player if you're unlucky enough.  But it doesn't kill the player, you just need to reboot.

In my experience, such files unfortunately include HE-AACs from the BBC iplayer, even after being chopped with mp4box into 15-25 min segments for compatibility. Often, fastforwarding and rewinding through them causes a "black out", prompting an automatic skip to the next file (this doesn't happen during playback, just FF/RW). I don't know how standard or nonstandard files from the Beeb are, but they're fine with players on Windows.

For me this is the only flaw of the Clip+ / Rockbox combo, which is otherwise of marvellous value!

Replacement for Sansa Clip+?

Reply #9 –
Quote from: euphonic on
Quote from: saratoga on
Of course.  A bad, unexpected or corrupted media file can crash virtually any media player if you're unlucky enough.  But it doesn't kill the player, you just need to reboot.

In my experience, such files unfortunately include HE-AACs from the BBC iplayer, even after being chopped with mp4box into 15-25 min segments for compatibility. Often, fastforwarding and rewinding through them causes a "black out", prompting an automatic skip to the next file (this doesn't happen during playback, just FF/RW). I don't know how standard or nonstandard files from the Beeb are, but they're fine with players on Windows.

A few years ago I recall problems with BBC audio streams using an ARM chip in a NAS box to run the server for a squeezebox. The cause I believe was the use of floating point numbers in the audio stream and the ARM chip not having floating point hardware. The floating point processing in software required too much computation to keep up. A commercial company had implemented a way round this for ARM chips but it was too much effort to pursue since I could both listen to the BBC streams on a computer or point the squeezebox at a server on a computer. Don't know if this is related to the problem you describe.
 

Replacement for Sansa Clip+?

Reply #10 –
Quote from: euphonic on
Quote from: saratoga on
Of course.  A bad, unexpected or corrupted media file can crash virtually any media player if you're unlucky enough.  But it doesn't kill the player, you just need to reboot.

In my experience, such files unfortunately include HE-AACs from the BBC iplayer, even after being chopped with mp4box into 15-25 min segments for compatibility. Often, fastforwarding and rewinding through them causes a "black out", prompting an automatic skip to the next file (this doesn't happen during playback, just FF/RW). I don't know how standard or nonstandard files from the Beeb are, but they're fine with players on Windows.

For me this is the only flaw of the Clip+ / Rockbox combo, which is otherwise of marvellous value!


I remember that bug report.  Its because those files are packed into a really weird MP4 filestream that allocates a very large amount of RAM.  Since the Clip+ has only a small amount of RAM, its possible that the stream might exhaust the available RAM forcing a skip to the next track.