SanDisk Sansa Connect (4 GB) MP3 Player

I liked my first MP3 player.  It was a Samsung, not an iPod, like everyone else had.  I didn't really want to run with that pack.  The iPod seemed to just be a status symbol, like if you had anything but an iPod what you were listening to wasn't really music, or something.  So I got a Samsung, and it was nice and small and good enough for me.

But then I got a computer with Vista, and for some reason my little Samsung didn't cooperate with Vista, only XP, which was a surprise to me, not having read the fine print on the MP3 package that I had long since thrown away.  So I needed an upgrade.

As a gift, I received this player, the Sansa Connect, and right off the bat there was a lot I liked.  I'm a big internet radio fan, and I could pick it up and listen streaming with this player, which seemed like quite a little feature.  You could also download songs at fairly minimal cost, through the Yahoo music service, which was also a nice feature.  The player itself was very solid, decently functional, and had a nice layout to the menus.

The rolling wheel on the front was better, in my opinion, than what the iPod had happening.  It stuck out a little further, so was slightly easier to turn, and it was durable, so I would be less likely to destroy the thing, which was a concern.  You could navigate pretty efficiently with this wheel, and the button layout on the front and top, while a little hard to figure out at first, did become easier as time went on.  I don't really have many complaints about the player itself.  No, the Connect is a fine piece of machinery.  Just so long as you never have to actually physically connect it to anything.

Plug this thing into a computer, and man did things turn ugly.  First of all, because the whole downloading and whatnot operation runs through Yahoo, you have to install the Yahoo Media Jukebox on your computer, and a more buggy and indecipherable piece of music playing software does not exist on this earth.  For hours I plodded through this nightmare, trying to sync songs, trying to play songs, trying to do pretty much anything, with very limited success.

I'm not exactly a tech wizard, I'll admit, but I've had computers and the internet from high school onward, so I'm in the generation that can still sort of figure things out, Windows-speaking.  The Windows Media Player makes perfect sense, and I've never had major problems with it, but if something didn't work exactly as expected, I could figure it out.  The Yahoo Music Jukebox (to paraphrase Lloyd Benson) is no Windows Media Player, and that's saying a lot.

So with this as its millstone, the Sansa Connect suffers greatly.  You can get around using the Yahoo Music Jukebox, sure, but now you have to convert and re-convert everything, and make sure all your songs are linked into using a different application, or you'll get whipped into the vortex of the YMJ again, and a great deal of your life will be lost, yes, lost to that horrible program.

Maybe if you prepare yourself for these things from the beginning, you won't run into the same discouraging problems.  Ignore the Yahoo Music Jukebox and link it up with something else (it may take some doing to get this to happen, though). It's worth it, though, it really is a fun player.  The sound is good, the speaker is fantastic for a device its size - you really don't need headphones to listen comfortably within, say, 8-10 feet.  

Of course, I wanted a higher-memory, bigger-deal MP3 player, about a year after I got this one, and so, again as a gift, I got a new one.  An iPod.  I'm not proud of selling out my non-iPod MP3 crowd, but man the Touch is cool. I still use the Connect for music, as I'm busy filling up the massive Touch with videos and apps, and I enjoy the Connect for what it is.  Could it be better?  Yes, absolutely.  But all in all it ain't a bad bit of music listening.