Sandisk Clip Sport Go and Audiobooks

USELESS AT PLAYING AUDIOBOOKS

Chapter mode is missing:
Imagine a folder full of files, each one a numbered track (or chapter) in your book. You would expect an MP3 player to get to the end of a chapter and then play the next one, wouldn't you? Earlier models of Sandisk players possesed this function. For some unaccountable reason it's gone! Sandisk have removed the function. The audiobook player needs every chapter to be started manually. Why do this? It makes no sense!

MP3 File compatability:
Best described as brittle or flaky. Be prepared for nearly identical MP3 files to either play without a problem, or throw up an utterly unexpected file type incompatability error messga. There are clearly some forms of MP3 file that are not recognised. Why would you make a device this way. Earlier Sandusk models didn't have this problem. It makes no sense. It's as though unnecessary changes have been introduced.

Equaliser function:
In theory, it is possible to use this to adjust the bass/treble. In practice, there seems to be a bass boost as part of the firmware and you can TRY adjusting the sound quality, but it won't get you anywhere. A strong bass response is not useful, when listening to speech and a hindrance, if you have a hearing loss.

Conclusion:
In theory, you can use the Sandisk Clip Spirt Go to listen to audiobooks, in practice, it has so many obstacles in the way that you would need a lot of patience. With file compatability, chapter playback and sound quaility all issues, you would be better off looking elsewhere. A good question to ask is where else you might look ...and that's anither issue entirely!

SanDisk Bluetooth mistake (Clip Sport Plus)

SANDISK's BLUETOOTH BANANA SKIN!

I'm publishing this because, the last I knew, SanDisk had done a very strange thing indeed. If you go looking for the full technical description of the SanDisk Clip Sport Plus, you'll find one technical detail manifestly missing (at least at the time of me writing this). Try as you might, you won't turn up what version Bluetooth is being used, as a transmitter, on this MP3 player.

I suppose if I'd dropped the ball in quite the way that SanDisk has, I might try to keep it quiet. It's true that the company can legitimately claim to have included Bluetooth functionality in this MP3 player, but its version 2. So, anything you are thinking of pairing it with had better be extremely backward compatible (or so old that it's not much short of a miracle that it still working)!

It's puzzling that such an old and useless version of Bluetooth should have been baked into one of their more recent devices and I suspect you wouldn't get any sense out of them, if you ever tried to ask them why on earth they decided to use such an ancient version of  Bluetooth.

My sole reason for publishing this posting was to make potential customers aware of what they could be buying  and the likelihood of them having the hassle of returning the product, once they discover that the damn thing won't work with much that is current technology.  It's not the first time that SanDisk have screwed things up quite so badly. I was one of the unfortunate individuals who bought the earlier model of Clip Sport, when it first came out. I discovered, somewhat latterly, that this had a reputation for locking up for no apparently good reason. Fully aware of this design flaw, SanDisk (nonetheless) carried on selling the product.

TravelPharm and Trustpilot,review censorship collusion

A couple of weeks ago I ordered some antihistamine tablets from a company called TravelPharm and the idiots sent me somebody else's order. When I called the company to try to straighten out what the hell was going on, I found myself talking to a woman who decided to get both precious and rude with me (a winning combination, as you can imagine). Eventually, I did manage to speak to somebody with fewer personality problems. My order arrived a couple of days later in an envelope so light that the packaging inside had been squashed in transit. Altogether, the sort of performance that you couldn't write a good review about, without lying your head off. Consequently, when a company called Trustpilot (you'd have to ask them why they decided on a daft name like this) contacted me, asking me to review my experiences in trading with TravelPharm, I didn't have a good thing to say about them. I think Trustpilot went ahead and published my less-than-complimentary review and then I think that TravelPharm read what I had written and (some days later) had asked for my review to be withdrawn (otherwise known as censored)! Don't get me wrong, I can understand a company wanting nothing that good reviews, but you have to provide good enough service that you deserve them!

PERSONALISED SOUND! SKULLCANDY CRUSHER ANC HIDES CONFIGURATION SOFTWARE!

PERSONALISED SOUND! SKULLCANDY CRUSHER ANC HIDES CONFIGURATION SOFTWARE!

The Skullcandy Crusher ANC headphones come with the ability to customise the sound to your own hearing. Unfortunately, it's entirely necessary to find how and where it is you do it. The Skullcandy website as a video that tells you that this feature is available, just not how to access it. I had downloaded the Skullcandy app to my android compatible phone and I honestly thought that all it did was reproduce what you could find in the hard copy of the instruction manual (white on a black background in really tiny print). Not finding the means by which I could customise the sound, I reasoned that there had to be a separate and entirely different app for doing this and I was keen to use this feature because I happen to have a moderate hearing loss as well as living with a severe sight impairment. The more I looked around for information, the more I encountered angry fellow users who had also failed to be able to use this feature. At one point, I honestly thought that the app that operated the customisable sound must be only available for Apple handheld devices! I also found myself going back through all the packing material, wondering whether there was a handheld device that came with the headphones. Nothing appeared to make any sense.

Squirrelled away in just one piece of information that I managed to find, was a reference to a button that you could very easily miss and was part of the Skullcandy app. This is what you do. You run the app and get as far as Bluetooth being logged in (see left-hand screenshot below). Two thirds of the way down the screen you will see a small faint line of text that is also a link and enables you to skip the instructions, click on this. You then get as far as the right-hand screenshot and there is a teeny-tiny button with a silly wavy line graphic, at the bottom right-hand corner of the screen (I have drawn in a red arrow to help you find this). You click on this and then you can begin the whole process of performing the hearing tests on yourself. One other thing, at the end of all the tests there isn't anything that tells you that your settings have been automatically saved to your headphones, the test just comes to an end, with no way of quitting out of it. Don't worry about this, just close the app in another way!