Digital Trends

Sansa SlotMusic Player October 28th, 2008 | by Nick Mokey

The slotMusic Initiative

Of all the new distribution methods that music companies have cooked up to replace the compact disc, SanDisk’s SlotMusic concept has to be one of the simplest – and perhaps, depending on your level of tech saviness, the silliest. There’s no Internet connection involved, subscription, or even DRM. SanDisk has simply taken the physical entity represented by a CD and replaced it with microSD cards.

The company sells slotMusic cards pre-loaded with music from different artists for $15 a pop. You buy the $20 player, pop the card, in and off you go. It’s the 21st century equivalent of a Walkman, with media that’s about as big as your pinky nail.

So far, pickins are slim. Only a handful of retailers, such as Wal-Mart and Best Buy, even carry the cards, and of those that do still only have a very limited selection of music to offer. But for the technically inclined, each card can be wiped or added onto, meaning the player itself has little relation to the slotMusic format unless users decide to adopt it as their method of distribution. 

Build Quality & Aesthetics

For a $20 MP3 player, the Sansa slotMusic feels far from cheap. SanDisk has actually taken the opposite approach from manufacturers that build lightweight-but-chintzy electronics from plastic, and built a player composed mostly of metal, that’s solid, but a little on the heavy side as a side effect. Depending on your taste in MP3 players, though, the weight actually lends it a pleasant, sturdy feel.

A solid strip of metal runs around three edges of the player, creating a C-shaped frame, which a plastic jacket snaps on to create the fourth edge. The shell also covers the flat faces of the player with whatever graphics happen to be stickered on to it, lending the player a degree of customizability through shells. SanDisk already produces custom versions of the player with band logos and other designs layered onto the plastic, for the ultimate fans of ABBA and Robin Thicke.

We liked the concept, but the shells also ruined the illusion of quality from the metal, to some degree. On ours, the soft stickers showed dents from even the tiniest marks, to the point where you could almost write your name on it with a fingernail. We suspect they may need replacement after making friends with a couple of keys and change at the bottom of pockets and purses. 

Accessories

Besides earbud headphones, a quick start guide and an alkaline AAA battery (which the company suggests is good for 15 hours), SanDisk includes a USB 2.0 microSD card reader with every slotMusic album, which is handy for checking out its contents on a computer or adding your own. Each card only comes loaded with one album of MP3s in 320kbps quality, leaving about 800MB free for extra music.

Image Courtesy of Sandisk