Sansa MP3 Player Great for Audio Books and Radio Programs

Click on picture to get one on sale from Buy.com

One of the really great things about the web and blogging has been the creation of audio content that is downloadable from literally millions of sources. My favorite morning radio program is downloadable from their website sans commercials for a small monthly fee. Many other programs ranging from news to New Age are available for download to your MP3 player.

We have an iPod and love it for its capacity to hold music by the bucketful and play songs by artist, album, genre, etc. It is a bit trickier to use it for the aforementioned MP3 content. For one thing, the iPod does not do a good job of managing the bookmarks in content, and it can be real bear to locate your spot in an audio novel that is 8 hours long.

 Fortunately, there are affordable options available to use as dedicated readers of this material. I got the Sansa MP3 player with 2 GB of memory and have used it constantly for nearly a year. I can download a week at time of my favorite monring drive time comedy show and listen while sitting in an airport or a country where I cannot understand the programming on the radio and long for something in English. It is easy on batteries and the headphones that come with it are usable, albeit easy to replace and never look back as well.

The controls are simple to operate and best of all, it keeps its place in every file on the device, so you can listen to a book, then go to the radio show and it knows where it left off. Some things are a little odd, I have yet to figure out how it selects the sequence to play multiple files, almost seems random, but it is easy to navigate to just the file you want.

There are other features, such as an FM radio and a recorder, but these are just “me too” features and frankly not that well implemented or useful. The real magic is in having a way to just pick it up, turn it on and start listening to an audio book right where you left it.