![]() There’s a similar menu for each function on the player. Pressing in the middle will sort the tracks by artist first, but then you swipe right to left to change the sort to go by albums, songs, genres and playlists. Once in a function like music, you swipe up and down to flip through the artwork or thumbnail for the last 10 files played. To switch from function to function, swipe your finger to the left or to right across the plus sign. Mass Storage Mode is the ONLY mode supported on Mac OS X. It definitely is not as elegant as a iPod, but it does indeed work. I won’t go into the details in this review, but it works fine for me. I am still searching for an easier way on Linux, but I am using Audacious and a Text Editor to make playlists. You can create playlists on the device in Mass Storage mode, but it’s not something I recommend for someone coming from a iPod or Zune to this device. If you are a Windows or Linux user and are a heavy user of playlists, I would choose MTP mode and use Windows Media Player or your favorite media player that supports MTP. My preference is for Mass Storage Mode as it will basically let you just drag and drop music from your hard drive to the player. MTP mode basically lets you use Windows Media Player to manage music and playlists on the device. MTP also will work with many Linux programs. Modes supported on Windows are MTP(Media Transfer Protocol) or MSC (Mass Storage Mode). The player will work in 2 different modes on most Windows machines. Sandisk ships no software with the player except for the cd containing the Rhapsody Music Service software. Although, I think, for me, that this will be a little used feature since my camera’s LCD is about the same size. This will help keep the interface a bit faster. It was a little slow, so you may want to resize the pics. I copied over some pics from the last year or so and was able to view the full-sized picture on the Fuze+. Photo support is included and it supports jpg or bmp. If you don’t want to use the Sansa Media Converter or video4fuze, the specifics on the video format you should use are over on this post in the Sandisk forums. It was just a relabeled version of a Intervideo product and you had to have your Fuze+ connected at the SAME time! I would use the open source video4fuze which is supported on Windows and Linux. Sandisk includes a media converter that I really hated. I played several podcasts and a recording I had made with the Neuros OSD and it worked well. However, the video support that is included is one of the most widely used formats for Video Podcasts, h.264. Video is one area where you just can’t get a player that supports everything you might want. SanDisk should update the firmware to support this. Ogg has supported album art for quite sometime now and it would be nice if the Fuze+ did. If the Ogg had album art in it, the file would be seen by the player, but then would not work. Ogg Vorbis encoded music usually works ok, but I did have some issues. The newer 2.4 version does not seem to fully work. If the tool you use supports v2.3 of the id3 tag, use it. ![]() For your mp3’s you ripped a while back, you may want to make sure the album art is embedded if you like to see it when your listening to music. So if you buy music on Amazon you are all set and the album art should just work. The Fuze+ only supports album art that is embedded into your music. Instead, the main control is a set of touch controls with a plus sign at the center. The similarities end there as this device is many times smaller than this phone and also does not have a touch screen or the wheel that the old Fuze had. ![]() The device has a look that is reminiscent of the HTC myTouch3g and almost mocks the entire form factor. The Sansa Fuze+ is a Sansa Fuze in name only as they have totally revamped it’s interface and control system and hardware for this device. Did it improve upon the older device or did it take a step backward? We’ll find out. Sandisk was nice enough to send me the new Fuze+ to review. I was impressed with what Sandisk had done with the device as well as with its price. Many of my friends have them and I purchased the last generation Fuze for my wife. Since Sandisk has long had compatibility with open codecs such as Ogg Vorbis, the Linux and Open Source community loves them. Sandisk has long produced the Fuze line of mp3 players and while they aren’t nearly as popular as Apple’s products, they do indeed have a following within certain communities.
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