Rockbox on Sansa Clip+ for large media collections?

[JEMSKU]

I've always been a user of hard-disk players because I prefer to have the choice of any of my music at any given time. I used to use the iRiver H140 with rock box, and I'm currently using a Microsoft Zune. I have 7200 songs across I believe about 140 artists. The Zune is dying and I need a replacement. I'm considering switching to the Clip+ because it's small, which is appealing since I mostly use it for working out, and microsds are large enough now to hold all my music without breaking bank. Plus Rockbox is awesome and I miss it.

The only real reservation I have is the control interface of the Clip+. Seems like the Fuse would be a better choice with the scroll wheel, but they are rare and overpriced. Anyone have experience using the clip+ with largish music collections? Is it a hassle to find a particular artist or song? Is there a better choice for my needs? Input is appreciated.

TL;DR: Is Clip+ a good choice if I will be trying to find an artist from a list of about 140 or more?

[Julian67]

I was using a Clip+ 8GB since about 2 and a half years ago with a 16GB card and with a 32GB card since about 18 months ago.  My other players are iRiver H140 and H340.   All are Rockboxed.

I would say that in terms of ease of navigation around a large collection the Clip+ with Rockbox is surprisingly good.  Of course the screen is truly tiny and also hard to see in bright sunlight but otherwise you can navigate really fast and scroll up and down lists very quickly.  My experience of the H140 is that the disk is slow and navigation can be a bit laggy sometimes.  The Clip+ is a lot quicker than an old hard disk player.  I used to have a Fuze v2 with scroll wheel and that is more convenient but, while it was good value when new, the price since it was discontinued has become much too high.

Bear in mind that these are budget items and are not beautifully made of very high quality materials.  They are decent for the money but don't expect a Sansa to last as long as an iRiver H140.  My H140 is still going strong on original disk and second replacement battery after many years (similarly my H340), meanwhile I am on my third Sansa player in three years - my Fuze v2's scroll wheel broke, my Clip died last week (probably my fault due to carelessness) and I just replaced it with a Fuze+ refurb because Clip Zip and Fuze+ new prices are getting very silly as well.

The Fuze+ extra processing power is really apparent when database is built or updating and this is incredibly fast with my flac collection compared with older or less powerful players.   Maybe this will be a factor for you too.  Another benefit is that the Pictureflow plugin works absolutely perfectly on the Fuze+ whereas on the iRiver H340 it was too clunky and unreliable (images mixed up, slow, made the player laggy).  Album art looks excellent on the Fuze+ and the screen can go bright enough to be useable anywhere.

Some Sansa players like Clip, Clip+ and Fuze v2 make annoying noises under CPU load or memory access and can hang or crash on big aac files.  If I play aac/m4a on my iRivers it works reliably with newest Rockbox version but the player gets quite slow and games plug-ins get are really slow.  The Fuze+ doesn't have any such problems as far as I can tell and is pretty civilised if you can live with touchscreen controls which in Sansa firmware are laughably bad conceptually and in use but very useable and sane in Rocbox.

I would suggest trying out the Clip+ and Clip Zip in the Rockbox emulator and if possible trying a Rockboxed Fuze+ in your hand to see if it suits you.  Probably one of them will suit you really well.

[JEMSKU]

Thanks for the reply! My biggest concern was scrolling long lists, but you make that sound like a non-issue, so that's a relief. I am actually now leaning towards the Clip Zip, since the screen is slightly larger and can fit more lines of text on it. I don't care much for album art on such a small screen but a splash of color can't hurt. I realize OLEDs are better in contrast and readability but unless there are any other major differences in sound quality or usability, I think I'm willing to live without it.