Nov 10, 2007 - 412 W - + 6 - 5 Sansa E280 on Debian Linux
I recently got a Sandisk Sansa E280 to replace my 20 GB Ipod because its harddrive died. I was originally waiting for the Sansa View, but I read on various forums that there were issues with USB mass storage. So, I went back to previous generation of Sansa, and found a good deal on Amazon for the E280 ($115 for 8GB).
As soon as I got the player, I hooked it up to my Debian Linux box and transferred a couple mp3's over using USB Mass Storage (MSC - I used this setting instead of MTP since that protocol isn't supported fully on Linux yet). In order to do change to MSC, you have to change the connection method on the player through the settings.
When I was finished, I unmounted the drive and disconnected the player. The player then rebooted itself and took its time updating its metadata database (song names, artists, etc). Unfortunately, the id3 tags of the mp3s that I uploaded didn't show up, and the files came up as "unknown".
I tracked down the issue by searching through several related forums. In short, the firmware of the e280 does not support reading id3v2.4 tags and gets confused by the presence of id3v1 tags. It's disappointing that Sandisk hasn't released updated firmware to deal with this, but I guess they're too busy suing people and putting out crappy follow on products! To correct for this quirk, I had to use easytag (great program) to retag all the files on the player to id3v2.3.
Some other issues/comments:
Images/Videos have to be in a non-standard format to show up on the device
No "smart" playlists, so I can't create a playlist (for example) that only plays back "Classical" and "Soundtrack" songs
No bookmarks in files or podcast/audiobook support - makes it hard to listen to longer tracks
The player goes to "sleep" too quickly and the UI is kind of slow at times
The e280 isn't much better than my Motorola ROKR Z6 for playing back music. The only advantages the e280 has over the z6 are the presence of a 3.5 mm jack and 8GB of internal memory!
I doubt that these issues will ever be fixed by Sandisk in firmware upgrades. Maybe it's time I try out Rockbox instead of the official firmware?
