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A long, long time ago (aka a few months ago) my much beloved square box COWON D2 met its fate after I got angry and punched the screen because of metadata malarkey. I'd show you a picture but I either lost it or threw it away and don't remember doing it, so just imagine someone threw a wiimote at it. Shortly after I picked up a Sansa Clip Zip after doing a whole 3 minutes of comparing it to the Clip+. The reasoning behind this is while its not as big as my D2, nor as good battery life, I know from past research that the Sansa Clips are some of the best sounding MP3 players on the market. The stock firmware supports the usual mp3 and apple malarkey but more importantly both OGG Vorbis and FLAC files, both of which are necessary for me. Long story short, it sounds a hell of a lot better than my old D2. Its able to amplify the whole sound stage at max (and above max, we'll touch on that in a second) far better than my D2 did. As I mainly use it in conjunction with my car stereo and I'd rather not crank my amp's sensitivity, this is very important. Interestingly, while it supports microSD/SDHC, it does not support microSDXC, odd as you'd think SanDisk, a flash memory company, would like to spread support for it but I digress. While the D2 has some fancy sound enhancements (BBE guff) and does sound pretty good, the Clip Zip is better at stock settings and I no longer find the BBE guff necessary.

However, there is a fatal flaw with the Clip Zip. The stock firmware is rubbish. Browsing music is alright, but the interface isn't the smoothest. It didn't display any album art for me and the minimum display timer is 15 seconds, so if you skip a lot of tracks like I do, the battery dies well below its rated 15 hour mark (for comparisons sake my D2 was rated for 52 hours, but even COWON admitted that was stretching it). "But Blithering Div!" you yell and waggle your fingers about, "You just told me that its the best mp3 player period." Yes I did and that is because there is a saving grace. Those of you who tinkered with old iPods already know where this is going.

See, there is an open source mp3 player firmware out there known as Rockbox. What Rockbox does, is take this lowly little Clip Zip and turns it into a music munching powerhouse. It literally supports every codec I can think of, from mp3 to AAC to Wavpack to APE to sid files and xm modules for chiptunes. I'm not sure if its implemented yet but midi file playback was in the works as well. Why? Fuzzed if I know but I'll take it. I now have longer battery life too thanks to being able to set the display timer to a integer lower than bloody 15 seconds. I can "overdrive" the amp to drown out idiots when I'm wearing headphones, its shuffle feature actually shuffles unlike my D2 and you can adjust the dynamic range (aka normalize) your music if you so please. And if you're super lazy like me and have some 24 bit audio floating around, it'll happily downsample during playback. It separates its file browser from the music "database" as well. Presumably so should you have a file that requires a plugin to playback, you can actually get to it. It does have some caveats like the control scheme. I've been using it for a few months and I'm still not used to it, but given I've used my D2 since 2008, that could be why. Another one is that the database includes "The" in the metadata so The Distance and The Seatbelts are in the same section rather than in D and S respectively.

All in all, this is the best music player when you factor in that for the 8 gig player and a 32 gig microSD card will set you back ~$83 if you get the UHC class microSD card like I did because I like instant gratification fast transfer speeds.

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