Customer Reviews

SanDisk Sansa e130 512 MB Digital Audio Player with SD Expansion Slot

5 star:		(92)
4 star:		(51)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(14)

 

 

This mp3 player is pretty darn good. It is light weight, easy to handle, and fairly inexpensive ($103 from Amazon). I bought the Sandisk over the Rio and RCA offerings because Sandisk, at least in my research, didn't seem to have the number of complaints about product quality and lack of customer support that the other two brands had. Also, it seems as if getting at least a 512MB flash memory player with an expansion slot is going to cost around $100.

This player represents the second Sandisk mp3 player in our household. We were impressed with the ease of use and tranfer speed of the 512MB flash memory player (with no expansion slot). The Sansa player is no different. It is literally drag and drop on to the Sansa. The number of features also put it over the top versus the RCA and Rio.

Overall, you can't beat the usefullness of this little gadget.

Pro's:

--Small size, light weight
--USB 2.0 file transfer speed (transfer 100mb worth of songs in seconds)
--Backlight display
--Plays mp3 and WMA (you can put both on the player at the same time and it doesn't even blink)
--Radio reception is fairly decent here in the hills, but still won't pick up all of the available stations in your area (none of the small mp3 players on the market get anything more than decent reception so don't use this as a selling point regardless of what you buy)
--Sound quality is decent even when playing songs at 64Kbps. If you use this compression level, get good earphones.
--Lots of features including a customizable 5-band eqaulizer with presets, WOW surround sound simulator, and other sound effects. Also, has stopwatch timer and a host of other settings you can play with.
--Battery life is excellent. Not as good as some, but still near the top of players that have good battery life.
--It comes with pouch, armband, earbuds, usb cable.

Minor Con's:
--When you purchase this player, buy headphones. The included earbuds are pointless as the sound quality is barely adequate and the included 3 sets of earbud covers can't keep the earbuds in my ears.
--The battery cover door comes off fairly easily. It looks like it's on there pretty tight but it's not. I think Sandisk did this because of the many complaints that the battery covers on their mp3 players were too difficult to remove causing many people to break the battery cover (like my fiancee did with her own player).
--Your music files need to be properly tagged. I thought my files were appropriately named but this player doesn't seem to recognize the songs. I think the ID3 tags on my music are not correct as the player will display the music title you typed in but it will also show the album, song title, and artist as unknown.
--The buttons on the front are hard to push if you are not expecting it. You just have to adapt to pushing the button deeper than you would think.
--The volume is controlled by a rotary wheel on the top right side of the player. It is very difficult to turn, especially when it is in the holder. I would have preferred two more buttons on the front or side than the wheel.
--Getting the player out of the holder is incredibly difficult. Wipe of the display of the player and the inside of the plastic holder before putting the player in the holder. The plastic film that protects the display during transport leaves either static or a light adhesive film on the display that makes it stick to the plastic holder after you put it in. It took me five minutes and many attempts to get it out before I realized what happened. Also be careful not to yank off the battery door when pulling the player out of the holder.


There you have it. None of these gripes add up to more than a minor irritation which is why I gave it five stars (I would have given it 4.5 starts if I could have). However, having experienced other mp3 players, this one has the best combination of manufacturer product reliability and product support, versatility and expandability (up to 2GB SD card), features, and sound quality. My finacee has started using my player instead of her own player.


Added on 4/25/05:
In my initial review, I forgot to mention two things. The Sansa ignores your file organization so don't bother trying to setup seperate folders for different genres of music. This is why I warned before to make sure that the music you have is named and tagged properly because it does allow you to play songs by artist, album, date added to player, and so on (let's hope SanDisk fixes this with some software upgrades). Also, there is about a 1-2 second lag when switching between songs. This can get a little annoying at times but you will get used to it. To be fair, one more upside is that I added a 1G SD card (SanDisk Ultra II) and after the initial 60 seconds to read the card and update the playlist, it doesn't miss a beat. I still really enjoy this mp3 player.

Added on 05/02/05:
My Sansa has started to drink batteries like I drink Coke. Not sure why; it could be using extra juice to read music on the SD card. I may have to purchase rechargeable batteries if this keeps up. I got 6 hours of playing time out of my last battery. My fiancee's Sandisk (a flash memory player, no expansion slot) goes about 15 hours on a AAA battery. Not sure why the huge discrepancy between our two Sandisk players but my best guess is that my batteries are being drained reading the memory card. It would be helpful if someone out there with some knowledge about this would write a review.

Added on 0725/05:
After having a chance to live with the player for a few more months, I have to downgrade the rating to 3 stars. The player has become harder to live with. It plays reliably and the sound is good but it is still drinking batteries like crazy and the rotary volume knob hasn't loosened up much. Sandisk hasn't offered any software upgrades to address the lack of being able to organize your files any way you want to and it is still very difficult to remove the player from its holder. Having owned several makes and models of players before, this is still better than those players because each of those players died 2-8 months after purchase. Shop around and get what sounds good to you.

I read all of the reviews on this page before buying the Sansa; some were fairly critical so I had second thoughts. In the end I decided to try it because it had all the features I wanted for a reasonable price. I'm so glad I did.

I use it with a 1gb SD card. With the card, the player holds about 55 CDs, and I keep some music on other smaller spare SD cards to occasionally swap out music I don't listen to as often without removing any of the albums I like to keep on hand. Without any expansion, the player will hold about 15 CDs.

A note -- when copying songs onto the SD card, make sure you create sub-folders and put the songs into them. If you put all of your music directly onto the card and not in any subdirectory, the player will not recognize them all; you'll get messages that the card is full when it isn't, and songs you know are on there will not be found. At first that's what happened to me. Then I moved my songs into folders (I named them "jazz," "rock," etc) and the problem completely went away, and the folders had no effect whatsoever on the music directory that shows up on the display. It took me awhile to figure all this out, but once I did, I was able to get to full capacity.

That was the last and only problem I ever had with this purchase.

The radio works suitably and gets adequate reception (admittedly I wish it had AM, but it doesn't). The screen display is effective and attractive for both radio and for audio files. The sound is good, and inserted properly, the headphones block out noise extremely well, stay in your ears, and provide quality sound -- with these headphones I can use this player mowing the lawn, on the treadmill, and doing other things that usually are too loud to use portable audio.

It's true that out of the box you cannot play songs in the order they're on the album, or create customized playlists. I find this to be a non-issue, or at worst a minor problem, but realize for some people it would be significant. There is now a free firmware upgrade that fixes this. By downloading the updated firmare (do a google search for "sansa sandisk firmware upgrade," it will be the first hit), you can create playlists, and songs will play in original album order instead of alphabetical. Problem solved!! But upgrade the firmware FIRST when you buy the player, not after loading music onto it, because the upgrade erases everything on the player and you'll need to reload.

It can go through battery power pretty quickly; but I love the fact that it uses conventional AAA batteries. Frankly it is much better to run out of power in 8 hours (if all the eq features are on, the display is bright, etc) but be able to pop in a battery, than it is to run out of power in 15 hours like an iPod but have to stop your workout (or be out of luck while out on a jog) to plug it into a USB port (or pay extra for an external AC adapter). When the guy sitting next to me on the plane has his iPod die, he's out of luck, perhaps for the rest of his trip. When my Sansa dies, I just put in a fresh AAA battery.

I paid about $80 on amazon (plus about $50 shopping carefully for a 1gb SD card). I couldn't be happier with the purchase and recommend this player highly.

1. It DOES retain your EQ (and other) settings in custom after power off.
2. Sounds better without SRS Wow (menu>settings>sound effect>SRS WOW>off) this eliminates bass clipping (distortion).
3. Jazz or Rock EQ sounded good to me.
4. I rip CD's with audiograbber (free) at maximum sample rate (320 I think). Click the penguins to get all info for mp3 (if you use audiograbber you'll see what I mean). I'm sure there are other ripping software products that do the same.
5. If you have windows 2000 or later with the updates, forget the CD. Put it in the microwave for 3 seconds (it's cool to watch what happens). Windows will detect this device, no problem. Just plug it in, and use Windows explorer to transfer files. If you are not used to browsing for music files on a computer using windows explorer, then maybe you need the software to manage your files (bummer).
6. The headphones sound almost identical to the Sony MDR-EX51LP Fontopia phones (like $25). (too hot on the mids for me though) However, I think the headphones included with this device have a little better bass. Mind you, they are not better than the Sony MDR-EX71SL Fontopia (which are $45). Nevertheless, I plugged in the Sony MDR-EX71SL phones and it sounded great!
7. Take an exacto knife and skillfully cut a place in the plastic cover in which to insert an SD card (kind of red neck I suppose). Never remove the device from the carrying case again.
8. You can sort by artist, genre, album, year etc. that's how I recovered from the "no folders" problem.

Why the score? I hate absolutes. I am very satisfied with my purchase. Office Depot for $70.

10/12/05 update.

Got 256MB card in and the powerup time is minimal 5 seconds or so. The battery life is maintaining.

Make sure to run the firmware upgrade by doing a google search for sansa-firmware, it should be the first result.

This will fix the order problem and a few others. It adds a Favorites list, as well. To use Favorites simply press and hold the center button for a couple of seconds. It will ask if you want to add the currnet song to Favorites, press the center button for OK, and that's it! You can clear your Favorites at any time.

The upgrade will ask you to clear all music from the Sansa, so be prepared. Firmware upgrades are serious business. Make sure you have a fresh battery and a reliable connection to the computer.

5/25/06
Bought two more for my children. All work flawlessly under heavy use. No need to upgrade the newer ones' firmware. I have three now. Getting ready to buy another one.

This is an excellent entry level device for listening to music.

The sound is ok. But switch to a different set of headphones.
The earbuds are adequate. Better than other sets I have tried.

The controls are simple. It is almost as if its designers were attempting to replicate the IPOD (without getting sued).

I do have two issues with this player. 1) You can't plug it in to an electrical current. I like to load music on to it and take it to work to listen to on my stereo in my office. Not being able to plug it in to the wall outlet means I have to utilize the battery always. It has a reported 17 hour playing time... this means if I only listen to it at work I will go through at least 3 batteries a week. Expensive.

The second issue is that there is no jack to play music through devices such as a stereo. There is a workaround for this, however. You can purchase a cord designed to split stereo audio in to the left and right (white and red) plugs that fit into your stereo. This cord plugs into the headphone jack of the player. It should only be a few bucks at your local radio shack.

I also like this player because it has upgradeable memory. This is the same memory module that our digital cameras use. So, if you have extra sandisk chips lying around you can erase their contents and save music on them. Imagine having an entire collection of music on five or six (or even ten... they are really that small) 1 gig memory chips that fit into the palm of your hand.

Also, the sandisk has something cool that I have hear that ipods do not have. A radio. This feature is nice when you get bored with the music that you happen to have saved on to your player.

Plus, it plays windows media format songs, mp3's and other file types. I have heard that ipods are limited to apple i-tunes and certain specific formats of songs.

I purchased this MP3 for my deployment in Iraq. It has survived all the abuse (ie: climate, sandstorm, and accidentally dropping it). Transferring music files is a snap. The sound quality is good. It even has a sleep feature (up to 2 hours). The in-ear headphones help filter out some of the noise so you can hear the music better. I especially love the memory extension feature. Overall this MP3 completed all of my basic needs. Just one note. The case was ample but sucks when it's hooked on the armband. It keeps on falling off so I modified it with the velcro sticker. I suggest that you do the same thing or purchase a better case for it.

I've had mine for about two weeks now. Overall it's a great little player. It could be better, but definitly worth having. This item is recommended. Even when better ones come out later, it will be a great MP3 player to pass on to someone else. I plan on buying another as a gift for a friend.

Comes with good headphones, but I have a really nice wide spectrum Sony set. Makes a difference in the lows and highs.

PROS:
- The sound quality is excellent - same as iPod as far as I can tell.
- FM radio works greats - picks up all the regular stations I
listen to. Sounds good. The player is of a high enough sound quality to easily tell the difference between a good FM station and a good MP3 song.
- Small and light - but seems durable enough.
- Screen is nice - clear and gives all the info. You can set how long the light stays on.
- Easily connects to computer via USB.
- SD card slot is nice. Takes about 6 seconds for it to load a 1Gb card the first time. Turning it on again later starts in about 2 or 3 seconds. Not annoying for me.
- Good for audio books - 1) has a button to quickly lock button presses and 2) you can fast forward over previously heard parts.
- Overall volume is loud enough for me - i like it real loud sometimes.
- Equalizer - only 5 band but it's great and customizable. The presets are good but I use a custom setting. You can even set the player to play full bass tones via SRS (recommended with better ear buds)
- Very compact and light. Easily fits anywhere you want.
- Battery life is plenty long, longer than I can pay attention to. I listen to mine a lot.

CONS:
- Navigation - not my favorite (I like folders), but it works ok. With a lot of different types of music with long names, it can be a bit tedious to get exactly what your looking for.
- Main menu navigation is not immediately obvious, but you'll get used to it. It's not intuitive how to get a favorite station.
- I agree with others the the volume scroll wheel is lame. Its doable but could be better. Takes pretty firm pressure to get it where you want.


MENTIONABLES:
- FM radio - it does remembers your last station and if you has present programmed in then it can jump to the next station forward or back. cool
- Once you do figure out the navigation and how to find the song you're looking for, it's pretty easy and works well.

NEXT steps:
- Really want it to play through my Passat's Monsoon sound system. :(
- It'd be great if it could record voice or lectures.
- Better volume control and 'menu' button. The latter is too hard to press.
- Another model/brand has it so that it recharges the battery via USB! That'd be cool!
- A little bit bigger screen.
- Playlist creator

I purchased this Digital Audio Player for $64 after rebates. The user interface is good, screen is clear and bright, sound is great, the FM radio works well enough, and the expansion slot will keep my daughter happy when she wants to add more music. Battery life is good and I like the fact we can use standard batteries rather than a built in battery that can only be charged inside the unit.

It has one flaw for us though. We like to listen to audio books (which can be downloaded FREE from our local library!). However this player does not have an Auto Resume or Bookmark feature so when it turns off it will only start at the beginning of the book. For music this isn't a big deal. For books that can be 10-20 hours long this is unacceptable.

We will keep this as my daughter wants it only for music, but we couldn't use it for my son who only listens to audio books. For him we had to buy the other Sandisk 512MB Player without the expansion slot.

I recently got the 512MB model and used it on a long airplane trip (24 hours each way)with Bose earphones, I had a 1 gig SD card with lots of music. As pointed out in other reviews, be sure to do complete tagging at all levels (album, track, etc. unless you just want to play in random mode) Synched to the Sansa with Win Media 10.
Two things I noticed:
1.When turned on, the device takes a lot of time to check the card for content updates, this seemed like several minutes each time even if the card content had not changed.
2.The battery life was more like 3-4 hours at best, maybe due to the SD card, you might want to consider the 1 gig model. I am still checking to see if different batteries make a difference. Also, if the battery is low, the device automatically shuts off after the card check, not before, so you have to change the battery and do it all over again.
However, I found the device to work very well overall in spite of the above, sound quality and volume no problem with the Bose phones, which I used before with CD player on airplanes.
I see price on this device is still coming down.
The FM worked OK even overseas, but would not get all stations probably due to being inside buildings, if you do get a clear station the quality is fine.

I've been very happy with this digital audio player. I bought it a few weeks ago, and wanted to put it through its paces before writing my opinion.
You can read the specs to see the features. I'll address a few things that I've seen in other reviews though:
-You CAN flag 'favorites' as a way of having a sort of playlist (you need to make sure you're firmware is up-to-date to do this). Since it was a firmware upgrade, there isn't any documentation on this, but you basically "hold down" the select button for a few seconds when listening to a track and you can flag it as a favorite, then playback favorites from the 'play' menu.
-The earphones are satisfactory. There are 3 different sized 'mushroom' shaped earphone tips for each side (L/R) to fit most peoples ears. If the in-the-ear design doesn't suit you, then you can use a differnt set of headphone (I tend to use a pair I already owned).
-Definitely try turning OFF the WOW effects before you try to judge the sound quality of this player. For those people that fantasize that they have a 'golden ear' that discerns audio imperfections, you may have still had the WOW effects on (which can cause clipping at moderate to high volume). If you still think you 'hear' poor quality sound, keep in mind that WMA and MP3 are lossy formats, and then combine that with the fact that mini-headphones aren't ideal as studio monitors, and you can see that digital audio players aren't really supposed to sound as the original source material produced on audiophile grade equipment.
-I love having the battery be AAA, since I already made the small investment in rechargeable batteries (having a baby at home means that I would already be bankrupt from disposable/alkaline batteries from baby toys if I hadn't invested in the rechargeable batteries)
-I also love having the SD expansion slot. You theoretically have an unlimited potential for memory expansion, if you carry around extra SD cards with you (only one can be plugged in at a time, but you get my point). I have extra 256M (1) and 512M (2) SD cards from other electronics, so its great to be able to use them with this too.
-I don't understand the complaints about the 'responsiveness' for the menus. You CAN use the volume wheel to scroll up/down in menus, but I ONLY use it for the volume control, since it doesn't offer precision when scrolling in menus. Instead, when I'm using the menus, my thumb is already on the face of the player, so I just use the up/down buttons to go up/down (since my thumb is aleady on the face of the player to control the right/left and select buttons), and those buttons have a good, tactile feel that offers the precision needed.
-No special software shipped with the player, and I'm glad. I use my MS windows to simply drag and drop tracks onto the player as it is listed as two removable drives (one for the internal memory, one for the SD card memory). No special software needed. The stuff that is packaged with the player is just a bunch or marketing/free trial offers for audio files, and I never even use the CD. I'm one of those types that HATES loading more and more junk on my PC. I'm already happy with the music management software I use, and now I didn't need to load any useless software.
-I have made sure that ALL my music files are properly tagged. If you don't do this, you'll be in deep do-do. (the ONLY problem I've had with the player is that the Windows Media Format/ASF specification calls for WMA files to use WM/tracknumber for storing the track #, but that tag and the WM/track tag are often mismanaged or inconsistently managed by tagging software, so my albums are often times not sorted by track order in the e130. I fixed this by simpy putting the track # as the first two characters of the track name in WMA encoded files). Since my files are all tagged properly, I don't care that you cannot browse and choose music by navigating the folders (side-note: my music is organized in folders by artist/album anyways, just because that is how I transfer and remove music from my player, so I can already access the music by artist and/or album using the play menu anyways).

Note: I don't care that this player doesn't have line-in recording, recording from FM, or voice-recording, since those are features I would not use anyways. I also do not use Audible/audio-book files, so I don't care that I can't bookmark a spot in a file. I think that early reviews from before Sept of 2005 were for people who did NOT have the upgraded firmware yet on their player, so some of the complaints were heard by Sandisk and fixed in firmware.

Nice mp3 player, gets the job done. The FM tuner is a definite plus. The user navigation is ok. There is an upper right click-wheel is for scrolling and another button on the side to select a menu option, and the buttons on the front for song/radio navigation. Call me spoiled but I've gotten use to the consolidated buttons and menu navigation of my Ipod. I'm more comfortable navigating this with two hands, but that doesn't bother me.

The size is small; it fits in the palm of my hand. I actually like how this player looks. The main reason I got this was because it is flash-based and I can work out with it without worrying about jostling parts. And also because it's expandable. I use it with a 1GB SD card. That's a BIG plus.

Drawbacks are ones that have already been mentioned by other readers, e.g. doesn't have an auto-resume reader, but I don't listen to audiobooks so that's not a big issue for me. One minor annoyance is how the songs are automatically sorted by song name ascending. I know I can rename the songs with a number in the track title like others have mentioned, but that requires more work than I'd like. Also, I haven't figured out how to create a playlist, or if that can even be done. It allows the user to choose from album, artist, songs, and some other options, so I don't think there's a way to make a mix of various songs. If anyone has figured it out, please post it.

Uploading songs is simply enough. Connect the USB cable from player to PC and create folders and just drag and drops songs with Windows Explorer. You can also copy songs off the player back to PC, which is nice.

Battery life is fine with me. I used up the batteries that shipped with this in about a day I think and shortly after got NIMH rechargeable AAAs. If you use this with an external SD card, it's going to consume more battery power...

Headphones are ok; I've never been a fan on the in-ear design though.

The plastic case that came with the player drove me nuts the first week or so. It was skin-tight and I almost ripped the case the first few times trying to get the player out to change the batteries. But now it's loosened up and works fine. I'm withholding a star on this review for lack of belt clip on the case. This might sound minor, but I'm not a fan of the included arm band when working out and so I have to put it in my pocket or hold it. It's small but not ultracompact so a belt clip would have been nice. I haven't found another case that would fit this that includes a belt clip either. If Sandisk offered one, I would purchase it.

And something I found out when I first got it...you need to leave about 4MB of space from the Sandisk 512MB that's included on the player for its software to work. (And note to Sandisk: you have a spelling error on the error message that comes up if there isn't enough space).

Let's see what else...I took the plastic port and SD card covers off, those aren't going to stay on, but no biggie. It also comes with a stopwatch function in the software. I like the Sound Effect and Equalizer features of the software, and that it can also play WMA files. And I don't know if I am the only one experiencing this but sometimes when I listen to the radio, the volume level seems to drop about two levels on its own. It happens rarely though; not yet to the point where it's become an issue.

Overall, I like this player. I looked at various models before deciding on this one because it had both an FM tuner and was expandable. Compared to other players in its price range, the included features are great. I would purchase it again.