Episode: 818
Title: HPR0818: Sansa Clip Plus for podcasting
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0818/hpr0818.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 03:01:36

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both parties.
Hello and welcome again to Hacker Public Radio.
I'm Poki and I'm pleased to be your host for today.
Today is going to be just a quick, I hope, little episode.
It's going to be a review of the Sansa Clip Plus as a recording device.
This is going to be the third HPR episode that I've recorded, though it may only be the
second one to air with the Clip Plus and with Rock Box installed, actually.
I have to say that as a recording device, I actually kind of like it.
As a player, I think it's really actually garbage.
It's one of the worst MB3 players I've owned with the stock firmware on it.
It's just not good for a whole lot of reasons and I don't really like it as an MP3
player.
It's only real, well, two, three, it's only real upsides as an MP3 player are it's small
so it fits in a shirt pocket really well and really comfortably.
It's much smaller than I thought and it's much more comfortable in a shirt pocket than
I thought because it's super, super, super lightweight.
I really like that about it.
It's fairly inexpensive, that's on the plus side and it has the SD card slot which is really
a nice benefit to it.
I'd like to say that Rock Box is one of its benefits, the ability for you to put Rock Box
on it is a benefit but that's not attributable to Sandisk, that's attributable to the Rock Box
folks and the good work that they do.
With Rock Box on it, it's a slightly better MB3 player.
It's certainly better than most of the MB3 players that I've had but even with Rock Box
on it, unfortunately, it just doesn't hold a candle to the Cohen I Audio 7 that I used
to use.
I've only stopped using that because it physically broke, it's physically broken inside.
A switch broke, fell apart.
I wore the thing out.
I had that for a long time and I do kind of dirty work sometimes.
I've had that thing full of concrete dust, I've had it full of sweat, full of rain water
and every time I broke it, I was able to take it apart, clean it out, clean off contacts,
scrape stuff out and it would start working again and it would work perfectly.
The Cohen I Audio 7 was the best MB3 player I've ever had.
I would have bought another one except you can't even get them on eBay anymore.
I would have bought an I Audio 9 except they seemed to have gone to a, what an America
would seem to be a proprietary connector.
I guess it's a mandatory connector for Korea, I don't know if it's North or South Korea
where it's made but apparently everything they sell in Korea has to have a standardized
connector on it and it is that.
That's very similar to, I think it's similar to a mini USB but it's slightly different
and it may or may not be compatible.
If it is not compatible then I have no use for the player.
I do not want a proprietary charging cable or a proprietary connector no matter how good
the player is.
I'm not willing to put up with that, I will just will not tolerate it.
It may be compatible with mini USB or micro USB.
I don't know and I'm not laying out 120 bucks to find out.
If anybody does know and wants to contact me and let me know, that would be fantastic.
But for the time being, I've got this Sandisk Sansa Clip Plus and like I said it's not the
greatest MP3 player.
Even with Rockbox, it does have its glitches here and there.
There are some good things that it does and there are some bad things that it does and
you have to like with any piece of technology, especially a gadget.
You have to learn to work around the things that don't work for you and I've mostly learned
to work around everything that this does.
My biggest personal gripe with it is that I cannot fully use all of its features like
its playback features without looking at it.
It would be really nice if I could never have to look at the thing and just use it by
feel and I could do that with the Co and the I audio 7.
I could do it with most every other player I've ever had.
This one occasionally gets into a screen where you're at a menu and you didn't really
intend to be in a menu and you're just trying to pause it to take the earbud out of your
ear and listen to somebody talk and very often I'll have to just take the earbud out and
drop it and get back to it and rewind.
That's a pain in the neck.
The other complaint with Rockbox, complaint feature request, whatever, I know other people
have requested it so I don't need an email saying why aren't you putting in a bug request.
I've heard that other people are requesting it.
It does not have an audible fast forward and rewind feature.
When you hold down fast forward or rewind and I'm going to talk about track skip, I'm just
talking about scanning through the file.
You can't hear anything.
The audio goes dead so you have no clue as to how far forward or how far back you're going.
You can take it out of your pocket, you can look at the display, you can watch the timer
and get a good idea of that but you can't do it without looking.
That may be because the fast forward and rewind are progressive.
The longer you hold fast forward or rewind the faster it goes forward or backwards.
Which is a really nice feature but whether that doesn't behave well with an audible
indicators to how far back you've gone, how far forward you've gone or whether they
chose that instead I would personally rather have the auditory feedback.
Autos when you turn it off or when you pause it and it powers itself down and you turn
it back on it will auto resume in the wrong file.
Auto resume I love and most of the time it does it auto resumes right where it was when
I powered it down but sometimes it will auto resume itself in the wrong file and it could
be any random number of time steps into a file that I'd never even played before.
I don't know how it decides to do that but that doesn't work quite right.
And I think that's it.
I think those are the only things about rock box that make it negative.
Other than that it's all back down just to the basic hardware being kind of too tiny
to feel to use without looking at it.
And I usually can.
I usually can use it without looking at it but every once in a while you bump something
and don't know what you've bumped so you don't know where from you know you're starting
point you wound up.
Mostly that's due to the hardware not having a physical lock.
Like a switch that you flip that locks its functions or a button that you hold down
for so long that it disables all the buttons on it for a little bit.
That's the cause of a lot of that but that's hardware.
Rockbox has just the flaws that I've listed as far as I can think and everything else that
Rockbox does is incredible.
It's astonishing to me how many features they've packed into that firmware and it takes
this cheap little crippled MP3 player and turns it into a real MP3 player, a respectable
audio media device.
It plays back MP3s, it plays back OGS, it plays back Speaks, it plays back Wave, it's just
incredible the capability that they've added to it.
But this review is and it's been a long preamble up to this is using the Sansa clip as a recording
device.
I'm recording on it now.
I'm using Rockbox.
The Rockbox has a whole plethora of settings that you can use while you're recording.
The one that I'm happiest about is, well there's two that I'm happiest, it's a tie, output
format.
I really appreciate that you have a choice of your output format.
It will output an MP3 wave pack, AIFF and Wav, I do not know what wave pack is, I don't
know what AIFF is, I think that's the Apple one maybe.
Personally I don't have any need to output to MP3 because I'm going to be editing stuff
anyway.
So Wave is my choice, but I really appreciate that they've given you the other choices.
If I wasn't interested in editing, if I just wanted to clip this someplace handy, you
know in record all I was driving, you know how I'll deviate or like Mr. Gadget's does
with his phone in episodes, which are fantastic by the way.
Thank you for those Mr. Gadgets, I thoroughly enjoy every single one of them.
If you just wanted to do that, it's perfect for that and it spits out an MP3 file when
you're done and you're done.
You can rename the file, you can go in later with a tag editor and edit the tags if you
need to do that, but otherwise it just spits out an MP3 one more can ask for.
The same if you needed it in AIFF or Wav pack, those are really nice features.
The other great feature that it has is that you can choose the bitrate or excuse me not
the bitrate, the sample rate.
I'm recording this at 44.1 kilohertz and it had choices all the way down to 8 kilohertz
and all the way up to what is it, 93 or 96 kilohertz, that was really, really great.
Another nice feature that this has and this may be overlooked is that it will output
to your headphones, everything that's coming in through the microphone.
But I have some ideas on that I'll come back to later.
You can record in stereo, you can record in mono, you can record in stereo left, you
can record in stereo right, which I imagine would output a silent track.
If you, like say, recorded in stereo left, I believe your recording would be on the left
channel and the right channel would be silence and by silence, I mean mechanical silence,
there would be zero, nothing, no value, which is cool if you want to add to it later.
If you wanted to record, you know, for instance, a guitar and then play that back later,
you know, through some set of speakers and then sing to it, whatever, I don't know, I'm
not a musician.
But I could see that someone might appreciate that.
I saw settings in there for there was stuff about clipping, there was stuff in there, just
more stuff than I needed to get into and I may do a little bit more research and read
the documentation and see what all those things are.
But certainly there was more in there than I needed to output this particular show or
the other two that I've already done or the other couple that I'm planning on doing.
As far as downsides to recording with rockbox, there's some background noise.
There's, for some reason, there seems to be some internal noise, some interference that's
happening that is being recorded because I've heard it on playback.
I'm not sure what causes it, I'm not sure how to eliminate it at the time of recording.
I am able to use Audacity and filter it out, just using their standard noise filter, which
is pretty easy to use.
But I don't know how to get rid of it beforehand so that I wouldn't have to do that.
There is a lot more noise when the display is illuminated.
Now whether it's coming from the light itself or whether it's coming from whatever signals
go into the display, I don't know, but it is recording it.
You can hear it in your headphones while you're recording and you can hear it afterwards.
What you're listening to now has been run through Audacity and has been run through the
filter in there.
The noise removal filter, so you're not hearing full on what it's like, but you may be able
to detect a little something in the silence.
Actually, in fact, just to make sure you know what it is, I'll cut a little bit of it
in right here.
Here's the noise that you get out of it with the display on.
Here it is with the display, it's just switched off.
And it kind of comes and goes like that every 10 or so seconds.
So that's what it sounds like.
That's what you get during your recording and during your playback if you don't edit
that sound of.
Actually, that's its only real main detraction.
Other than starting it and stopping it, it's not ergonomically obvious what buttons you
press to start and stop your recording and to exit the recording function.
It seems like what I've done to start it was press the home key.
And if you press the home key again, it will stop your recording briefly and the file
and begin a new recording.
While you've got it stopped, if you hit the power button twice quickly, it will exit the
recorder.
That seems to be what I've done to make it work.
While you're in the recorder, it's pretty cool actually.
You can move the cursor up and down through a small menu in there while it's recording.
You can adjust the volume of the headphones while you're listening so you can turn that
up and down and you can adjust the microphone gain.
This particular recording is set at a gain of 3.0.
I tried it with a gain of 1.5 and a gain of zero and they just, they're very quiet and
I had to adjust the gain back up in Audacity.
So this is partly a test.
This is at gain 3.0 plus 3.0 decibels.
Oh, the other negative, a big negative, all of the Sansa Clip Plus as a recording device
is handling noise.
It's got a tremendous amount of handling noise.
It is not a microphone, you know, it's not a professional microphone.
It's got no sound, isolation, no noise, isolation built into it.
It's got no noise, cancellation built into it.
So any little noise that you make, it's going to pick up any little motion that you make
with your hand while you're holding it, it's going to pick up.
You're going to hear it.
What I've done to try to eliminate that handling noise is I'm wearing a baseball cap, which
I almost never wear.
I hate wearing baseball caps.
I'm doing this just for you people.
I hope you appreciate it.
I've got it clipped to the brim of the baseball hat because the Sansa Clip is called
so because there's a clip built into it.
So I've got it clipped onto the center of the bill of the cap, the baseball cap and to
the top of it so that the screen is pointing up, effectively pointing the microphone down
towards my mouth where the sound's coming out of me.
That seems to work pretty well.
As long as I don't jump around or move around too much, I mean, there, if I shake my head
a little, you're probably hearing a little something there by wiggle my eyebrows so the
hat moves.
You'll get that.
Mostly it's pretty well eliminated just by doing that because you're not moving your
hands around on it.
But anyway, while you're using it, it's got a menu you can cycle up and down through
and you can adjust the volume, you can adjust the gain and the file name you can highlight.
Knowing rockbox, you probably can rename the thing.
You can probably rename the file.
Probably you can do it while it's recording, but I'd be willing to bet.
You can rename the file when you're done recording or before you start recording.
I just haven't taken the time to figure out how to do that because it's easier to do
on a real keyboard anyway.
When you use rockbox to record, it saves the file on the root directory of the player's
internal memory.
To me, that's a slight negative.
I would prefer that it would save the file to the SD card so that I don't have to plug
the MP3 player in, but it doesn't do that.
It saves the root directory.
Now it's only slightly negative because I don't actually have to plug the MP3 player
in to get the audio off of it.
Rockbox has the ability to handle files like a regular file manager.
You can cut and paste the file from the internal memory to the SD card, or if you're concerned,
you can copy and paste it and then go back and delete the original file later.
It takes a little bit of time to copy a big file like a long recording, but who cares?
That's better than plugging it in.
The reason that it's better than plugging in is because if you have the MP3 player powered
off, or if you've got Rockbox settings set so that when you plug it in, it powers Rockbox
down.
If you plug it in with a USB cable to a computer, or even to a wall, charger, the stock
sends a firmware starts up, and every time that firmware starts up, from being plugged
into a cable, and every time it starts up after being plugged into a cable, it goes through
and it rebuilds its database.
It takes quite a bit of time if you've got a lot of files on there.
It can take some time to rebuild the database, so you're just waiting and waiting and waiting.
That's a downside to the Sansa stock firmware.
The other downside to the Sansa stock firmware, if you're running Rockbox, is that it creates
file folders, it creates directories that I don't use, and I usually delete because they
just get in the way and slow me down.
It's really stupid.
It'll create, for instance, on the microSD card, it'll create an audiobooks directory,
and it'll create a podcast directory, and it'll create a music directory.
Inside the music directory, it creates another podcast directory, and another audiobook
directory.
I don't know what the point of that is.
I don't know why it does that.
Those directors are there, and they can confuse you because, oh, there's my audiobooks.
Nope, I guess it's not.
I got to back up two folders.
No, I know it's not a big deal, but to have to do that several times a day can really
get annoying and frustrating.
What I've done is I don't keep music on the SD card, and I don't keep audiobooks and podcasts
on the internal memory, so I only ever had to put music on it once, and then from the
internal memory, I can delete the podcast folder, the audiobook folder, the audible folder,
I don't need that, and basically every folder, except for the music folder, and then from
within that music folder, I can delete the unnecessary podcast folder and the unnecessary
audiobook folder.
On the SD card, I just delete the music folder, and I'm left with audiobooks and podcasts,
so I got everything I need to avoid having to plug it in and deal with all that.
I'll just turn it off after having cut and pasted the recording to the SD card.
I'll just turn it off, take the SD card out, pop that into a computer, and do my file
transfers and manipulation there that I like doing.
Now I did use the stock firmware to do some recording.
If you don't want to mess with Rockbox, and you just want to record from the clip plus
with the stock sends a firmware, you're actually going to get a pretty good recording out
of it.
It doesn't have, for whatever reason, that background noise that happens to be there when
you record with Rockbox, it's not there.
I don't know why that is.
I would be interested in finding out why, and maybe submitting a bug to Rockbox so that
background noise could be eliminated, because if it weren't for that, it would be almost
a perfect recorder, be darn near perfect, it'd be great.
The downsides to over the other upside, actually, to recording with the stock firmware, is
it still outputs a wave file.
You don't have a choice as to what kind of file it outputs to, so it's going to be wave,
and you can't choose MP3 or anything else.
But for a default choice, wave, in my opinion, is the best one.
You don't lose any audio, you don't use any resolution from it, it's the most compatible
with the most number of systems.
I understand it's a large file, but whatever, this thing's got two, four, eight gig of internal
memory, depending on how much you pay for it.
I don't think file size is too much of a concern.
If it is, buy an SD card, and move some stuff off onto the SD card, make some room it,
it shouldn't be that tough.
The other downside to the stock firmware, is it will not output audio to the headphones
while you're recording.
Now that may be fine, I'm not using it right now, I've got a clip to the rim of my ball
cap, and I'm just trusting that it's picking up what I'm doing because it's worked several
times before.
If I were doing interviews with this, I would want headphones, I would want to make sure
that I'm picking up audio, to have that positive feedback on a file that you care about, and
you're only going to have one shot or recording that you're only going to have one shot at.
That particular feature is invaluable, and for that reason alone, I would choose to use
the Rockbox firmware over the stock firmware.
That said, that's how it records with the one or with the other.
Now what I wanted to get back to would be doing interviews.
I think it would be a really great idea to build a small handle similar to a microphone
and have a piece at the top of the handle with like a flat part, a bit of flat, maybe
plastic, and wrap it with some real nice high-density foam, and maybe even insulate the flat
plastic from the handle with some high-density foam.
Something that'll really absorb some sound, but to do that and then clip the sands a clip
onto the end of it, I think the thing could be an all-in-one microphone slash recording,
slash monitoring device.
You would of course need to find some way to fasten the headphone cable to the handle in
such a way that it would isolate noise, maybe down the center of it, maybe it could come
out the back that way somehow.
You might even be able to build a cable into the handle that had a male headphone plug
on one end and a female headphone jack on the other so that when you clipped the clip
onto your little handle, you could plug that in to the clip and then plug your headphones
into the back end of that.
You could walk around a conference with this thing working as if it were a real microphone,
just recording everything.
If you had a couple of SD cards with you, and you know, just transfer the stuff off as
you started to fill it up, you could get everything.
You could do recordings all day.
It would be small enough to fit in a pocket, you know.
You wouldn't have to carry any extra gear with you.
You're already carrying your MP3 player and your headphones.
I can see that from where I'm sitting.
You know, all you'd have to do is make this little handle.
I plan on making one.
I'm not exactly certain how.
I'm going to make it what I'm going to do, but as a starter idea, I'm probably going
to take a wooden dowel, maybe like an inch and a half, inch and three quarter, two inch
wooden dowel, whatever's comfortable.
Drill out the center of it and maybe find some kind of piece of plastic.
The plastic I'm thinking of that I think would work really great.
It almost looks like it's made of recycled milk bottles, maybe, but it's like thick white
plastic and you get it a lot of times with three ring binders.
They use it as like a sheet lifter.
I've made a bunch of stuff out of that plastic.
I've used that for a lot of different things.
It's really easy to work with.
You can cut it with a utility knife.
You can cut it with like electrician scissors or a real nice thing to have or any kind
of sturdy scissors that have serrated teeth to them.
You can bend it, you can heat it and form it and mold it.
I think that stuff would be great as a starting point, but if you were to make something that
looked like the shape of like a flat square lollipop out of that plastic stuff and put
it down inside the handle, you know, like what would be the stick of the lollipop, what
would look like that.
Put it down inside that wooden dowel handle, run the headphone cable up next to it and
then, you know, wrap the whole thing with some kind of high density foam included in place.
I think you'd have a pretty well isolated and sound insulated device that you could
hang your sans a clip off of or you could use maybe that expanding foam that great stuff
I think is the market name of it.
You could put everything together in there with your little audio cable and everything and
then fill that handle with great stuff and I think you'd have a really nice recording
device.
I think you'd get some really respectable recordings out of that.
So that's what I'm going to try.
I don't know when I'm going to get around to it and I just thought I'd get the idea
out there to anyone else, you know, and hacker public radio was going any fast, hopefully,
you know, if you think it's a good idea and you want to give it a shot, there'll be time
enough to do that and you could grab some content for HPR.
I think that would be fantastic.
If I get it to work, I can take some pictures of it, of the build, post those up on Picasso
or something.
If it works, I don't know if it's going to work, it may not work.
But if it does, I think it's a really cheap way to get this thing done.
That's the real beauty of the sans a clip is its low cost and high capacity.
Dollar per gigabyte is a good return on your investment.
You know, all its other faults, you know, rock box kind of just chugs away at fixing.
That's it.
That's my idea for the, for the sans a clip is a recording device.
That's my review of the sans a clip as a recording device.
If you're looking for a low cost recorder and you don't want to plunk your money down
on like one of those micro cassette things because they're kind of useless and you still
have to transfer it or a little digital recorder because it doesn't have enough capacity and
maybe even it's got a lot of handling noise anyway.
This is not a bad way to go.
It does seem to be a pretty decent thing to do.
That's my review.
I hope you enjoyed it and have a great day.
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