Sansa Questions

[scarfy]

Hi. I'm considering getting an 8GB Sansa (for use with Rockbox, obviously) to replace my aging iRiver and just have a couple of questions,

1) How's the battery life (especially when playing Oggs and with a WPS on)?

2) Has any investigation been done in to the SD card slot? Or is this likely to be an impossible addition?

[saratoga]

1)  Relatively poor.  It has the same battery issues as all the portal player cpus.

2)  Toni posted a patch that enables SD support.

[scarfy]

Poor as in 3 hours, 5 hours..?

Just don't want the player to die on my after just 4 hours...

[cpchan]

Poor as in 3 hours, 5 hours..?

It is definitely way more than 5. I use it for several hours everyday and I have yet to see the battery meter go down past the half way mark (and I am using more power draining Ogg Vorbis).

Charles

[Vortex]

It looks like the recent power saving improvements turned out well. When the display (backlight) is turned off the battery lasts quite some time. I have yet to test the exact runtime but I would estimate at least 8 hours of "normal" use, that includes changing tracks (thus turning on the backlight) once in a while.

Don't know how long the battery lasts on pure music playback but that could be tested with battery_bench.

[scarfy]

Well, I went ahead and got one the other day so I'm in the process of setting things up...

I'm going to apply a WPS with album art and then do something like play a mixed of Oggs and MP3s in normal and then shuffle mode to see what happens. Just to simulate "normal" usage

[Vortex]

Good idea! Make sure to post your results when you are done testing.

am using more power draining Ogg Vorbis

Does it really make a difference even though the Sansa does not yet support frequency scaling and things like that?
I'm just curious since I thought that an idle CPU drains as much energy as a working CPU when running at the same frequency.

[scarfy]

Unfortunately my battery bench test didn't work properly.... Must have done something wrong since the file was empty. Anyway I can still describe what I did,

Settings,

• Backlight off
• Volume ~15db (can't be 100% sure)
• AquaDock WPS
• Playing a directory of 300 MP3s and OGGs (192 average bitrate)

I put my Sansa on to play yesterday morning at 8:30am just before I went to work.  I came back in at 6pm and took a look at the player... it was still going! Pretty good.

I left it for a little longer and kept checking it. At 9pm it was still playing. Around 9:30 I fiddled with the player and put the backlight on so I could see what it was playing. I put the brightness on low.

At 11:30pm it was STILL going. I left it overnight so don't know when it finally stopped.

Overall I was very impressed with the battery life... I was expecting it to have died when I came in after work.

To conclude the Sansa lasted for over 12 hours with the backlight off and playing a bunch of MP3s and Oggs at ~192kps

I'll use it over the weekend with the WPS and brightness on low and see how I go from there.

[vinnie97]

Nice, trumps the Rockboxed Nano performance by nearly double perhaps.  I've just started using my Rockboxed Sansa regularly lately and have noticed I can go much further on a charge than with the Nano (6-8 hours).

[Vortex]

Unfortunately my battery bench test didn't work properly.... Must have done something wrong since the file was empty.

It was the same when I tried to battery_bench my Sansa. The file just remained empty but I haven't found out yet what I was doing wrong. I did everything as stated in the wiki, played a rather large playlist and did not run any other plugins.

[Llorean]

The Sansa uses flash memory, and the Battery_bench depends on disk spinups to know when to write the file. Because the Sansa doesn't have a disk that spins up, it probably never writes the file.

This was fixed for the iPod Nano, but I think that was before the Sansa was a working target, and the fix was part of the ATA code, rather than the plugin, I believe, so the fix may need to be defined or added in for the Sansa as well.

[Vortex]

Wouldn't it be easier to change battery_bench so that it automatically logs the battery status every 15 minutes or so on the "diskless" targets?

Since the Sansa doesn't have a disk to spin up, like you said, there probably wouldn't be too much of an additional power drain from battery_bench's disk access. Or does accessing the flash memory drain large amounts of energy?