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Sansa slotMusic Player, What Are You Thinking?

SanDisk has rolled out a new music player that plays music off of microSD cards. The cards come loaded with music in the same way that a CD is. The player will also play cards that you load yourself so that you may make your own mix tapes.

It seems to me that this is one step backward. I remember being asked years ago what physical media would replace disks, and I replied “Solid state”. You see, with the growing capacity and plummeting price of memory chips I thought that in the future, you would put a cartridge in a box to make the music go. I was so wrong. While, yes, some sort of physical media is needed to store whatever music and video information you want to play, it has become antiquated as a way of distributing that information. It’s all done with wires and radio-waves these days.

The future of personal player?

Slotmusic sounds like any other mp3 player with the exception that instead of plugging in the player to your computer to load it up, you have to plug in a microSD card to your computer… and then plug the card into the player. Somehow I don’t think adding in an intermediary step to the proccess is a feature. Sure, the whole point of having these cards is that you can buy them preloaded with music, or swap out the 1GB worth of music for another GB when you need a change of playlists. But let’s be honest here, say you have an average file size of 5MB per song, a 1GB player would then hold approximately 200 songs. At 3 minutes a song that’s 10 hours of music that you could listen to straight without ever repeating. If the player had a 10 hour battery life I would be impressed. The idea that I would need to switch over 1GB cards is silly. It doesn’t work with how people use their players; which is to cram it full of songs they like, listen to it a few hours a day then change it up every couple of days. For the true music junkies, who have buds grafted into their ears, it’s worth it to shell out for a few extra GB to meet their needs.

Here’s another point. MicroSD cards are tiny. They are appropriately sized for losing. I don’t want to keep track of something that is less than the size of a postage stamp.  Then there is the issue of price. These preload cards are going for around $15. I remember when CD’s first got a toehold in the consumer market. They went for around $14, which was about 50% more than what one used to pay for tapes and records. It was said that the jacked price would come down to the $9 level once CD’s became more ubiquitous. I think you all know how that story ended. Given that album lengths are roughly 10 songs, you would be paying $1.50 a song. Of course you’re paying over the $1 a song model that iTunes has going on, that extra 50 cents per song is going towards paying for the card (or lining the pockets of the fat cats).

Don’t get me started on the enviromental impact. Instead of buying one storage device that lasts the lifetime of the player, you are potentially buying additional storage devices throughout the lifetime of the player. So much wasted energy and materials in production, transportation, packaging.

The only thing they have right is the price of the player.  At $20 one might think of picking it up, but if you wait 3 months I’ll bet you can pick up a typical 1GB player for that price anyway. Save your money, slotMusic is going nowhere.