I used to have a Sansa Clip Plus. After years of awesome service the clip from the Clip Plus broke off, which made it much less useful. For the last year I have been using a Sansa Clip Zip – a much newer model.

I wasn’t as happy with it as I was with the old one because the software on it wasn’t configured as well as the old one. Some nonsense about MTP and categorising songs based on their tags drove me to write shell scripts that would reset tags on my downloaded podcasts, just to disable that feature.

Thankfully I have a friend named Cesar who also has one of these players and mentioned a thing called Rockbox – open source firmware for several players, including the Sansa Clips. I installed it – the installation was almost newbie-proof but a couple of things would have stumped a non-engineer. The Rockbox firmware allows me to change just about every setting imaginable, so I configured the player to work exactly the way I want it to work.

I love it, thanks Cesar!