I recently purchased a Sandisk Plus Clip talking Mp3 Player and thought
I would post a quick review.
There are three main reasons for bringing this Review to your attention.
1. The unit is accessible and not horrendously expensive.
2. Just as importantly for those of us with hearing impairments the unit
produces excellent sound and is loud- loud- loud-
3. It falls then, to my mind, as a high priority device for those of us
who are deaf blind.
The unit is small and plays through earphones only. If you research this
unit on google there are a multitude of complaints that the unit is too
quiet. It turns out that this nothing to do with the unit hardware but
artificial volume restriction in the firmware. Happlily for those of us
whose ears are restricted this artificial sound volume block is erased
by the RockVox firmware installed.
I bought the unit because I wanted to step up my exercise routines and
did not fancy having one of my expensive Daisy type player or iPhone
bouncing around as I did sit ups etc. The unit cost £75 but has
accessible training materials and RockVox firmware already pre-installed.
The unit I purchased was from Computer Room Services and the delivery
was fast and prompt. My sister ordered a unit for herself and received
the unit 18 hours after placing the order. Mine took a little longer,
arriving just over 10 hours later. There is an audio CD withh a Quick
Start familiarisation guide which takes you through the tactile buttons
and the Unit operation. This audio recording is a brief introduction.
This introduction is clear and concise and it definatly does get you
started and covers all the important first steps in using the player.
However I thought this introductory material could nevertheless be
usefully xpanded. For example my unit needed to be soft reset before my
computer recognised it. This is a simple step and I think Computer Room
will be adding anote on that. Also some of the unit's operations need a
little getting used to. For example you press the up button to pause a
track, but in other circumstances pressing up will announce the previous
track name in a playlist. None of this is a show stopper but could be
made easier to grasp. The RockVox manual is provided in both PDF and
HTML format on both the audio disk and the device itself and you can
dive into that but it is very much a tec manual. As RockVox is open
source this is not the responsibility of Computer Room but I think a
slightly expanded set of beginner instructions could be usefully
extracted from all the tech content of the RockVox documentation.
The unit comes with 4 GB of internal storage but a micro SD slot easily
provides for upto 64GB of SD card storage. This is very cheap on Amazon
at the moment. I bought my sister a 32GB Card for £7.
In operation the unit appears to recognise and open the SD cards without
any reading delay. As I am used to Daisy Players taking time to read SD
cards this was impressive.
Although the unit talks this is not by TTS
. Basically the RockVox firmware relies on creating audio clips to
identify whole names of albums and tracks. Without this step the unit
will only spell the name of tracks and albums.
A small program is provided to create the necessary audio files on both
the device and the SD Card storage. So this device will need access to
a PC or support from someone with a PC for full Talking Functionality.
For example I will be putting the audio filename clips on my sister's SD
Card for her.
The PC Software seems to rely on self voicing with no screen reading
elements I can find. It works quickly but what I personally found was
that if you left it working in the backgound and did something else your
screenreader output would not be interrupted to tell you that the
process has finished. This was not really a problem as I found I could
simply just relaunch the program and eventually it would tell me almost
immediatley it had finished with a note of number of folders and files
provided with identifying audio clips. The software uses the default
Windows TTS
on your PC to create the audio track lables. In my case Ivona Brian
which fits nicely with the Player as Brian is also the default system
voice there.
Once the audio lables are added, a farily speedy process, using the
player for music is generally very smooth.
The unit has bookmarking facilities, can increase both speed of playback
and alter pitch so could be also feasibly used for Audio Books.
In practice because I am used to my Daisy players I missed some of the
navigation elements for book reading, also there seemed to be something
like a 10-15 minute limit on the extent to which you could fast forward
on a file.
Having said that it is perfectly possible to use it for Audio Books and
I would personally with its tactile buttons with instant feedback find
it more convenient to use than say VoiceDream on an iPhone. I have put
an audio book on it for emergencies. I guess it is also reassuring if
all my Daisy Players packed up.
However to my mind it is with Music that it excels with a very high
quality output, as well as a loud output. This sound belies the small
size of the player.
The player is less than the lentgh of my finger and I would normally be
scared to lose something so small. As it name indicates though it has a
strong clip which can attach securely to either an item of clothing or
conceivably a lanyard.
The unit also has voice recording and FM Radio capabilities but I have
used them little, I would say that the radio also plays at good volume
and there is an auto scan when you start the radio for the first time.
Anyway my early first impressions.
David Griffith
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