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!

The Alexa gift and ongoing puzzles

It's a funny old world and here I am trying to re-purpose my old blog! I've just spent absolutely ages deleting all the old entries, so that I can (more or less) start afresh.

Apart from the usual church-free christmas, which is the normal and usual way of things for me, I got one rather unusual and unexpected gift. A good friend bought me an Alexa Echoed Plus and I've spent about a week messing around with it. I've discovered that my main use for it turns out to be as a wireless loudspeaker! It's ironic, because (as I understand it) this electronic device is mainly used as a means of driving other devices (and not the other way around). As far as I can make out, configuring in and using a Bluetooth transmitter as a means of playing the output of your MP3 player, through the Alexa speaker, is an undocumented function.

I got too clever for my own good, a couple of days ago and tried using the very same transmitter in conjunction with another kind of receiver. I then discovered that the Alexa unit could no longer locate the transmitter. It took me awhile to realise that there was quite possibly a command that got Alexa to go looking for existing Bluetooth devices, and this worked!

I know I can play stuff from my Audible library on this unit, but there isn't a viable way of doing the same thing with audiobooks in MP3 format, not that I've been able to find (so far), although I've only been hunting around for a few days! I'm not surprised that Amazon want to try and shut out other sound formats as much as possible, so was to retain their jealously guarded exclusivity. There are normally weighs around Amazon's attempts at generating a monopoly, but they are not all that easy to find (in my experience).