Sansa Clip: cheap and cheerful Ogg Vorbis and FLAC support

Earlier this year I moved to Tooting and started using the Northern Line to commute. At times this line is so busy that it can be difficult to read a book without elbowing a couple of people in the ribs, so I decided to buy a new MP3 player and listen to podcasts on the train to pass the time.

Having pored over the spec of the lovely Cowon iAudios, I eventually opted for the cheap and very cheerful Sansa Clip 2GB, largely on the back of a glowing review from anythingbutipod. I also ordered a pair of Sennheiser PX100 folding headphones.

The PX100s are great headphones for the price, but sadly aren’t up to the job of keeping out the extremely loud tube noise. I did some thorough investigation of noise cancelling headphones and concluded that they were too bulky and expensive. In the end I went for the more sensible noise isolating headphones and bought some Sennheiser CX55s. The sound is nowhere near as good as the PX100s and they lack bass, but the rubber flanges sit tight in my ear canal and are very effective at keeping out noise. I have forced myself to overcome my hatred of in-ear phones so I can actually hear what I am listening to.

The Sansa Clip is very small and easy to stuff into a pocket. The sound quality is fantastic for the price, but a few things have frustrated me ever since I bought it. Firstly, it didn’t support Ogg Vorbis. Roughly half of my audio files are encoded as Oggs and I had never really got around to re-encoding them, so about half my music and comedy could never make it onto the Clip. Secondly, the interface has always been a bit fiddly. For instance, you couldn’t add a track to your GoList (the adhoc playlist) without actually playing that track.

Unbeknown to me, Sansa’s engineers have been quietly working on improving the firmware. In May, they added Ogg Vorbis support and just a couple of weeks ago they added FLAC support and in some previous release, they’ve added the ability to add tracks to the GoList without playing them. Better still, the firmware update is extremely easy from a Linux box. With the two things that were annoying me most both having been fixed, it’s like having a new player.

Sansa (who are actually Sandisk in disguise) deserve credit for investing engineering time into supporting their customers. At under £30, the 2GB Clip must be one of the cheapest audio players to support Ogg Vorbis and FLAC. There’s now a 4 GB version and they have other products, such as the Fuze with higher storage capacities. The interface on the Clip still can be a bit awkward to use, but they seem to be fixing that.