Sansa Slotmusic Player and why the iPod became so popular.

Shortly after Christmas I stopped by a Best Buy on a lark to kill some time and picked up a slotmusic Player. It was cheap ($20) and seemed like a good alternative to a iPod Shuffle. Well after forgetting it in my truck for a couple weeks I finally got around to messing with it. As the name suggests it's not exactly the same as a shuffle due to the shuffle's very limited amount of memory and zero expandability options. The SM player uses micro sd for memory and doesn't 'require' computer connectivity for use. But that's just marketing bullshit, if sandisk thinks anyone is going to buy their preloaded slotmusic cards they are out of their minds. And this is essentially the problem with SM player it doesn't connect to your computer so their is no software that streamlines the process of loading a microsd card full of music. What I ended up doing was creating playlist in iTunes that would fit onto the 4gb micro sd card I had and dragging and dropping all the tracks onto the card. As painful as that was I still had problems because of some of the tracks were so old in my iTunes library that the were still in wav format and not the mp3 format so I had to skip those tracks and pick only mp3 files.

This is why the iPod was able to dominate in the portable music player market after Sony had been on top for so long, their software was so much better than the minidisc software at the same time. I had 2 minidisc players and when I finally gave in a bought a iPod I never turned back. I continued to use my minidisc players but they eventually fell out out of my life.

After all that, I was able to fill up the card and begin using the SM player. Navigation is impossible due to no screen on the device but it wasn't and issue I was just going to use it as giant mixtape anyways with no discernable order or playlists. All in all, it is a good not great alternative to the iPod shuffle. If your like me and need the micro sd slot to future proof your player than the SM player is for you. If you need an easy player that can sync with your iTunes library without much effort than you probably spend the extra 20 bucks on that shuffle.