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I read an article recently about "the fiercely loyal" owners of the Sansa 200e Series MP3 players. I don't know who these fiercely local Sansa owners are, but they're obviously stupid. The Sansa 200e has been, no doubt, the biggest disappointment I've ever had the privilege of paying for.
Until Now.
So, long story short, a couple of weeks ago my Sansa firmware crashed while building the database and wouldn't restart. After slumming around on the Sansa forums for a few hours, I managed to get it to boot into recovery mode, but I couldn't find the firmware installer for the life of me. Most of the links on the Sansa Forums offered only a shrug and a suggestion to call Sansa Support. Finally, I found a bootleg firmware on a well-known anti-ipod site, managed to get the sansa restored.
And then it crashed out again.
So I put Rockbox on it.
And Now it's _awesome._

I mean, think about this and try not to let it blow your mind: I'm Dual Booting my MP3 player. It boots up in Rockbox mode, but if I press the [back] button at startup, it'll launch the default firmware.

Rockbox adds root-level control to your Mp3 player. I can browse my music files via directory, or via the database, which automatically inventories the files based on ID3 tags. Full control over the files I put on the device. Nothing more, nothing less. Thank you, Rockbox.

Furthermore, Rockbox makes loading and browsing photos on the device easy and enjoyable. No more crappy Sansa Media Converter software on my system.

It's far from perfect. It's a third-party firmware. I suspect it's got some issues with power management and I think there are some places where the "usability" could be improved-- but the more time I spend with Rockbox, the better I like it.

I have been, by and and large, disappointed with my Sansa e280. The update software is garbage and the integration with Windows Media player is marginal at best. Maybe someone here can help me with some issues:

1. There are certain songs that I cannot, for the life of me, get to register with the player. No matter what I do, the song only appears as Unknown artist, Unknown album. The only way to find the song is to track it down via its track name. I've checked the tags with third party tag-writing programs, as well as with windows and even with iTunes, but no matter where or how I put in the missing Data, the e280 will not recognize it.
2. Album art recognition is marginal at best.
3. I cannot get a playlist _into_ the machine. If I drag a playlist into the e280 via the sync tab in Windows Media Player, it synchs the songs, but not the playlist itself.
4. Podcast Support is completely absent, and unworkable mostly because of the issues I seem to have with creating playlists.
5. Only about half of the time do videos I want to add to the player actually convert. And then only a select few actually play.
Look, guys, I'm not expecting the Sansa to be an iPod. I don't care if it doesn't have the nicey-nice iPod features that come with integration (and being locked into) a proprietary software/synching mechanism, but this e280 is no iPod.

It can't even start to compete.