Note see also Sandisk Clipham and Portable Music Players and Linux
Because the Sandisk Clipjam appears to be no longer manufactured, the most approximate portable MP3 player (with clip, suitable for running/bicycling) is the Ruizu x52 mp3 player. It is about $25 USD on Lazada, sold by Ruizu itself, with good reliability ratings.
The unnecessary
- The large earbuds included are too large (for my medium-sized ears), and produce disappointing sound, and are generally a waste. People, please stop including crap earbuds with audio players.
- The syncronized lyrics is interesting but the screen is too small for it to be very usable, though I can see some value.
- Included ebook reader is ridiculous, see screen size mentioned above.
- Radio (not useful for me but others might find value)
- Video player: ridiculous, such a small, low resolution screen, and any videos must be transcoded into a different format (AMV, 128x128).
- Picture viewer: see Video player above
- Pedometer (really?)
- Calendar, stopwatch, alarm...
The bad
- MicroUSB instead of USB-C (granted this was first available 5 years ago (2019) but come on, it is 2024 now.
- The use of buttons is not intuitive and is a learning curve, just for things like backup up to the artist or album directories.
- Physically larger than it needs to be.
- Cringe video
The decent parts
- A better physical interface than the ClipJam, including a dedicated on-off switch on top, USB connector on bottom, and volume up-down on the right side. The headphone jack is on top instead of the side.
- Up to 128gb MicroSD card slot
- Larger, color screen
- While noticeably larger than the Sandisk ClipJam it is nearly the same weight (25g vs. 23g)
Ongoing issue: 4,001 song limit
- While it can read a 128gb microSD card, it doesn't do so well at seeing all the music (artists, albums, songs) that are there. I've got 15,000+ songs (1,000+ albums) -- 103gb -- and it only sees 4,001 songs (314 albums). That seems to be a limit no mater how many times I rebuild the playlist. This limit (4,001 songs) is hard to find on websites and in documentation, but it is present on some related products.
- Note that the ClipJam has a 2,000 song limit, so there is some improvement here.
FLAC to MP3
These portable players do not support FLAC, so the best approach is to do conversion and remove FLAC. This can be done on a regular basis when new FLAC are added. Sorry audioheads, but MP3 is fine for me.
find -name "*.flac" -exec bash -c 'ffmpeg -i "{}" -y -acodec libmp3lame -ab 128k "${0/.flac}.mp3"' {} \;