Here's the actual text content of the review of the sansa player have posted on inclusivePlanet.com.
Just that in this file, you'd have to copy and paste the links. <smile> Stay well Jacob Kruger Blind Biker Skype: BlindZA '...fate had broken his body, but not his spirit...' __________ Information from ESET NOD32 Antivirus, version of virus signature database 4833 (20100203) __________ The message was checked by ESET NOD32 Antivirus. http://www.eset.com
Sandisk Sansa E260 Talking media player I got hold of this item from Accessible Electronics, and you can check out the specific website here: http://www.talkingmp3players.com/ Here you can listen to a small podcast which will allow you to hear how it works and sounds etc.: http://www.talkingmp3players.com/uploads/2/0/4/6/2046538/talking_rockboxed_sansa_e200_series_player_demo.mp3 To join the email mailing list for these players - just send a blank email to: RockboxedSansaTalkingMP3Players-subscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Anyway, while it took a bit of time for it to arrive due to festive season postal activity, it arrived nicely packaged, and in perfect condition, and after having gone through the quickstart guide which you find in a manuals folder on the unit itsself I started playing around with it quite nicely/easily. Will firstly just say that the E260 which I got hold of is a 4Gb model, but also has a slot for a micro SDCard memory card to add on to it if you need/want more space, and while it's a standard multimedia unit, this one has had the firmware upgrade done using something called rockbox, which allows it to speak as well, and I think the currently used voice is something like scansoft jill - english, but think you could also use the rockbox utility to change the language if you really wanted to. Anyway, the whole unit is around 8cm long by 4cm wide and 1cm thick. When it's facing you, what comprises the screen covers the top half of the face/front thereof, on the top right corner is the headphone jack socket, next to which, and sort of in the centre of the top edge, is a control locking slider switch, and on the top left corner is the built in microphone. It doesn't have any built in speakers, so you will make use of it in conjunction with either headphones, or self powered speakers, like standard computer speakers since it uses a standard 3.5mm audio line jack. Below the screen portion are the general control buttons etc. which include the power on/off push button on the bottom left part of the frontal section, a left/right/up/down scrolling wheel, backward/left and forward/right button and inside the scrolling wheel is the select button, and just below it is what gets called the submenu button, but it seems to get used for a few different things, since for a form of context menu in some situations you'll actually use a long press of the select button. There is also what gets called a record button on the sort of top left outside edge of the unit, but I haven't really used it for anything as of yet. When the locking slider is slid towards the headphone jack, the buttons are all locked and you won't even be able to turn the unit on/off, but if you slide it left, away from the headphone jack it unlocks the controls. Once headphones, or self powered speakers are connected into the headphone jack socket, when you then hold the power button in for I think around half a second the unit will switch itsself on, and it should start reading the initial menu item it starts off on - generally something like resume playback, but sometimes something else, but that's not really an issue. To scroll through menu items you use the scrolling wheel, which has a slightly grooved/dotted edge on it and it sort of goes through clicks as you turn it with each one relating to a new list item in either direction, and to open the submenu, you either use the select button in the middle thereof, or use the right key, almost like you would do with cursor keys on a normal computer keyboard. The main menu items are as follows (and not sure which is really the top one, but they keep the same order and it does scroll from bottom to top etc. if you keep going: resume playback settings recording fm radio playlists plugins system recent bookmarks files database I'm not going to go through all of the functionality, but basically, the unit can play audio files like MP3, WMA etc., can apparently play some video file formats, has a built in FM radio, which I think makes use of the headphone cables as a form of aerial, and can record either from it's built in microphone, or record off of the radio as such, and it can apparently also display some image files in something like standard bitmap format. To start off with, if you go into the system submenu, you'll find time and date which allows you to set the unit's time and date, as well as some things haven't tested yet like a sleep timer function which I presume would let you make it automatically switch off after a certain time period even while playing, since if not actually playing it has the functionality to make it turn off after a specific period of inactivity to save battery levels. The second menu item in the system submenu is rockbox info, and under this one you'll find a battery level indicator - when fully charged it says it has around 24 hours of operating time left, memory usage info, etc. etc. To get out of submenus, you just press the left/back button, and it'll go up one level at a time, or cancel an actual setting change if you never press select on a selection. Now if you go into the main menu settings submenu, you'll find things like sound settings which controls sort of equaliser settings, playback settings, which I think controls playback behaviour as well as how it'll react to key presses during playback etc. and under general settings, you'll also find things like file view settings wich let you control what file types it'll actually show - as in supported, or all etc., bookmarking settings, playlist settings like one that let's you control if folders are added to playlists recursively - as in supporting subfolders - etc. etc., but not going to bother with too much detail here - you can always ask questions about specific features. Here you also get to control timeouts for auto shutdown, display backlight timeouts (sort of like a screensaver which then also affects whether or not you might have to activate the display/turn off the screensaver first before actually getting it to react to a keypress). Anyway, let's start off with the FM radio functionality, and if you go into this item, I think it starts in auto scan mode, where pressing left and right will get it to try find an active broadcast either up or down, and pressing the play button mutes/unmutes it here, but a long press of the play button will cycle through auto scan, scan, and preset modes. In scan mode you can move through the frequencies yourself at 0.1Hz per key press, and if you've already set it as a preset it'll also spell it out to you if you get there, and, like said, pressing play/pause turns on and off actual broadcasting playback. If you do a long key press of the select key, it'll also invoke the context menu, which will let you save the current frequency as a preset, where you get to enter a name for it - will get to naming/labeling/renaming a bit later, and in preset mode, it'll let you jump through the list of saved presets. I generally mute the radio first before trying to make use of these scanning modes, although it will still try talking to you by sort of dropping the output volume of the playback no matter where you are invoking this context menu, since it also seems to apply specific context menus to almost all operation situations on this unit. Anyway, if you want to get back to the main menu, you generally seem to hit the power button and it'll go back there, and I think it'll also stop playback/exit where you were, except it seems that if you hit the submenu key below the scrolling wheel it might try jump back to main menu with playback continuing in the background, and if you were in media playback which you'd invoked from the file listing etc. it'll initially just stop playback and go back to the file listing, so it seems like maybe the short press of the power button just exits current situation or something, but it's something you get pretty easily used to. Another thing you can find on the context menu while listening to the radio is recording, and I think this will automatically start recording the radio playback into an MP3 file for you, and during playback, the scroll wheel turns volume up and down FWIW, and this does also seem to affect the volume of the menu voicing but you can't adjust that unless really during playback as such, so sometimes seems best to just turn volume up to full before exiting playback - using power button etc. Secondly, if you go into the recording main menu item, you'll sort of hear it start echoing whatever's happening around you since it activates the built in microphone, and here if you press the play/pause button it'll start recording, and pausing recording is also done using the play/pause button, and exiting this section using the power button will have saved it automatically in the part of the file system you've set to recording location - but will get there lower down. Also think the context menu here, or the recording settings under the settings menu will let you set options specific to types of recording, etc. FWIW, but not sure how it'll invoke if actually busy recording, and also not sure how the sort of screensaver would maybe stop it from stopping/starting recording with the play/pause button happening, so, to be honest before hitting a functional button when busy with playback/recording I'll generally just touch the scroll/volume wheel to make sure it's going to actually react before hitting another button. The microphone is on the very top, left outer edge of the unit and you can feel a small gap there, but it also means you'd generally hold this piece facing you if you were dictating to it, but not too close, or, I suppose make sure it's pointing in the general direction of the sound source, if recording something like a lecture/presentation. Now, on the main menu, if you go into files, it'll let you browse the memory of the unit and if you changed the file display settings to only show supported files, it won't show you folders and files it can't really play, or that I think don't contain media files, and you'll also find that if it doesn't have a talking clip for a specific file or folder it'll spell it for you, but generating these is something will mention when it comes to copying media files onto the player. Like the menu systems, the scroll wheel will take you up and down the listings here, and the right and left buttons will move you up and down the file system structure, or if you're focused on a file it'll do the same as the select key, which will try open it if it's a supported format. Apart from the file display settings allowing you to control what file types are shown here, they also let you control things like sort order etc., but anyway. The standard, original folders you should find on the unit include things like .Rockbox, manuals, MyMusic, utilities, Videos, etc. etc. and there would be few more, but not going to bother too much with details, and also depending on display modes some of them might not be displayed all of the time as such. You can also create your own folders using the file system context menu, and it can also be used to delete items, cut and copy them, rename them, invoke an open with... submenu which doesn't really seem too usable, etc. Anyway, for example, if you scroll down to the MyMusic folder and hit the right key, it'll go in there and you'll find subfolders containing music etc., and you can go into them and browse the files/folders there as well, and will again just say that if it doesn't know how to speak something, it'll spell it to you as such. Anyway, the context menu will also vary depending on what has focus, so for example, if you're focused on a folder with audio files inside it, you'll find a playlist menu item which under it will let you add files to current playlist etc. including shuffle mode, and another playlist setting you'd find under the general settings is whether it'll work recursively on subfolders, so, for example, if you had that set to yes/true, and you were focused on my music, you could invoke the context menu, go down to playlist, hit the right arrow key to invoke it's submenu and choose insert shuffled to add all of the contents of the folder and it's subfolders in sort of shuffled/random order mode. Sometimes it might sort of prompt you to confirm something like deleting the current dynamic playlist, or would ask you to confirm deleting a file etc., and the standard for a yes seems to be the select key, whereas I think almost any other key would invoke the cancel functionality, but I would generally use the power button since it gets you generally out of the current situation/context anyway. After you find a specific file you want to start listening to, I would generally hit the select key, and it'll start playing, and the scroll wheel would then affect the volume, the play/pause button will do exactly that, and left and right can be used to jump back to the beginning of the track if not too near the beginning of it, or else to the previous track in the file listing with the left key, and right to jump forward, where holding these in will do a form of fast forward/rewind through the current track, but haven't tried this out too much yet. While busy playing, the power button will take you back to the file listing where you were, and an automatic bookmark will be created so you could easily enough resume playback from where you where in a longer file either through the resume playback, or recent bookmarks main menu items, or by browsing the file system to find the folder specific bookmark file, which stores bookmarks specific to specific locations, and if you hit select on these files, it'll bring up the list of recent bookmarks for the specific location's files so you can scroll through them to find the right one and hitting select on it will make it start playing from there again. Another context menu item you'll find on the folder context menu item is to set it as the recording directory, and this means that when you make recordings the MP3 files will get saved there eithers as something like RM... or RMFM... is recorded off the radio, but you can then rename them if you want. Rename is a context menu item and if you select it, you'll be in a sort of virtual keyboard where you can select characters to type and it's sort of arranged in columns of 9 characters or thereabouts, and while haven't found the numeric characters as of yet, I have found that if you go to the left of the first character column, you're on an edit item and then left and right will move through the currently typed characters, and the submenu key will delete to the left one character at a time, and then using the scroll wheel to navigate back to the actual typing character listings, you'd use left and right to select a specific character and select to type it when it'll then read the current file name back to you, and hitting the play/pause button will save changes, unless there's a file with the same name in the same location, and I think hitting the power button wil cancel the renaming/name editing. FWIW, this name/label entry process is the same one you use in other situations like the names for a FM radio preset. Finally, in order to recharge the battery of the unit, or to copy media files/recording files on and off the unit, you'll insert the cable it came with into the bottom edge of it, and you'll feel the wider cable plugs sort of spring release clips which allow you to then unplug it from the unit, and the other end is just a standard USB cable. When you plug the unit into the computer, and then, or when it's already turned on, the computer should see it as a standard USB external flash drive, and you won't be able to make use of the player as such when it's connected to the computer, but there's apparently a way to make it only receive a recharge from the computer/cable, without the computer seeing it as such, so you could then still play media files on it, and apparently, this occurs if you hold in the select key while plugging it in or something, but this is also something haven't bothered with. You can just copy media files into the recommended MyMusic folder then and there using windows explorer etc., but I prefer to first move them to an outgoing location on my local hard drive and run what's called the voiceBox utility on the file structure there to generate the talking files for me so that the file and folder names etc. will get spoken instead of being spelled as such by the rockbox firmware on the player. Bsically, apart from things like the quickstart guide you'll find in a manuals folder on the unit, you'll also find a utilities folder there with a few files in it, including VoiceBox.zip. You'll also see files named something like VoiceBox.zip.talk, but these are the ones we'll generate with voiceBox now. Anyway, I would generally make a back up of the whole unit to somewhere on my local hard drives, just in case, and then take this VoiceBox.zip file and extract it somewhere else, and then when you hit enter on the VoiceBox.hta file it'll bring up a sort of web page application wich lets you do things like decide where to find the relevant folders/files, etc. and run the utility which will then generate speaking talk files for each file and folder you have select therein as such, and then when you've copied these over to the unit, and browse them in it's own files browser, it'll use these clips to tell you what it's seeing as opposed to spelling something it doesn't find a .talk file for. These files are generated using your computers default SAPI voice, which you can change under something like control panel, speech, on the text to speech tab, but that might vary from operating system to operating system, but anyway. Anyway, I'd generally run this utility first and then go and copy all the files over to the MyMusic folder, or other folders I have also created like eBooks etc.,and FWIW, I switched my default SAPI voice over to other languages like Afrikaans and German before letting it label some content as well. One final thing is that while if you're not actively listening to something, or browsing files or menus, I think the default shutdown time is something like 3 minutes, which is one of the settings you can change, but alternatively a longer press of the power button will make it say shutting down, and it'll be turned off. This is all just my relatively newish users version of this player, and I'm sure will still find and make use of various other parts of it's functionality etc., and while can try answer your questions, it might be best to either also contact AccessibleElectronics, or look into the mailing list above. Either way, will just say that I'm rather impressed with this whole unit, and while the only other thing would have liked off hand is an external microphone jack, there's really not anything wrong with it as far as I'm concerned. Jacob
