SanDisk Sansa e260 4 GB MP3 Player with MicroSD Expansion Slot (Black

I have owned the Sansa e260 for about a year now and after 6 months it became extremely problematic. The main issues are with playlists and uploading new songs. Created playlists often disappear, certain songs will play and then never play again, random play often puts you on a loop of hearing the same songs over and over again and syncing up to my computer to re-format and erase old songs so I can add new songs often crashes the whole player. Sansa website is not customer friendly and their downloads often do not download. ( you have to go to their website when your player crashes to re-boot it.) If I could go back in time, I would not buy this mp3 player, even though the price is attractive and the looks are cool.

This is great for hiking I only wish there were a way to clip it to your jacket or pack. It was a great buy for the money.

I own a SanDisk e250 that I have been very pleased with. My father in law wanted a compact way that he could have his music collection with him anyplace he was going without a lot of hassles. I purchased this unit for him and transferred all the music he wanted onto the mp3 player. Coupled with a speaker dock he now is able to play his music anywhere he wants to.This unit is easy to use and operate and he thinks that is amazing that he can have 1000+ songs available to him on such a small unit.

The MP3 player I received works very well and I cannot see how it is any different that a new one. I purchased it for listening to books on tape while working out and it works excellently for this purpose.

I bought this product (Sansa E260) simply to have a little more memory than my original SanDisk player, which is only a 256MB player - but still in great working order. After a lot of researching, I settled on the E260 - even though it was older than the FUZE, Clip, and other models. The replaceable battery was a big seller for me - as I didn't want to have it die after a year & then have to buy a whole new player.

I love the extra memory, as now I can download radio podcasts (2 - 3 hrs of content) and listen to them at my leisure, without having to discard some music to make space.

The possibility of playlists was also interesting me, as I also use the unit for learning songs that my band is playing, so want to group them together for easy access. Also, being a magician, I was looking for a way to group the music for my act in one place and then play it from there. An MP3 player allows for the easy changing of a show, simply by altering the playlist, rather than burning a new CD each time.

Here is where the problem comes in:

The player will not allow me to create playlists (at least, not in the manner that I expected). Sure, it will add the music to the player, but won't keep a folder/file called "Band Music" (for example) that would contain that music in order to access the 5 songs I need, rather than all 200 on the player. As you can see, for a magic show, this would obviously not work.

There are work-arounds, but will be a bit of a hassle if I have to do it on a regular basis.

ALSO - It seems that the player only allows two ways to decide the order of my music - either in "Shuffle Play", or by "Artist". So - even if I play by grouping of Genre, when playing from the "Country" folder - it wants to play all of the Kenny Chesney songs, before moving on to any of the Brad Paisley songs (for example) - again, unless I want to "Shuffle" (which, by the way, resets the order every time you shut the player off - so you have the potential to hear the same 3 songs - in the same order - multiple times in a row - yes, it's already happened). There should be a way to play a random mix of the songs in the "Country" folder - perhaps like in alphabetical order of the title (like my old player did).

So - overall:
Do I like it? Yes - despite my complaining, I do like it quite a bit. The controls are wonderful, after you figure them out.

Is it better than my old 256 MB player? Not even close (except for the memory).

However, I realize that if I weren't set in my ways - I would absolutely love this player (except for the Playlist issue) - so yeah, go ahead and buy one!
-------------------------
Okay - here is an update on this player - by using Rhapsody, it will allow you to create playlists - I was using Windows Media Player before. Rhapsody will allow you to do this by downloading their software, but you do NOT need to purchase their service as long as you are only going to load your own music. Now, it seems, my playlist issue should be a non-factor. Hooray!!