Sansa e280 and Leopard

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Level 1

15 points

Sansa e280 and Leopard

I am thinking of getting a Sansa e280 or e250 for downloading MP3 audio book files from my iMac.
Has anyone encountered any issues with these players?
I understand the battery is recharged through the computer USB connection. Does this work with the Mac?
Can the player be erased and formatted with Disc Utility?

iMac, Mac OS X (10.5.6)

Posted on Mar 22, 2009 11:56 PM

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Answer 1

Mar 26, 2009 4:09 AM in response to Jack Benlow1

Jack,

the Sansa e280 & e250 aren't officially supported on the Mac OS So there is probably a good chance your going to run into some headaches. My Mother in-law got a Non-supported player and when I... lets just say on my mac I to ran into some dead ends. Disk Utility can do deadly things to a MP3 player. Lucky we reformatted in fat (from the mac) and then fat32 (from the PC) and all is wonderful now. But enough about that.

If you have your heart set on Sansa I might recommend going the 'Fuse' route, it is officially supported. More on that here: http://www.sansa.com/players/sansa_fuze

But of coarse what kinda of a guy would I be if I didn't also link you to one of the all time best media players for the mac: http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shopipod/family/ipodnano?mco=MTE3MzA

I hope that helps,
Weston

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Answer 2

Jack Benlow1 Author

Level 1

15 points

Mar 26, 2009 3:50 PM in response to westongallagher

Hi Weston,
Thanks for your comments.
In the meantime I had already jumped the gun and purchased a Sansa 280, which I am very happy with. However, all I have done with it so far is download an MP3 audio book and listen to FM radio.
I realise this device is not officially supported by MacOS, but at least Leopard doesn’t reject it. I was able to mount the Sansa 280 as a removable drive on the desk top, erase it with Disk Utility, and reformat it to MS-DOS (FAT32) without losing it’s database.
When mounted on the desktop it accepted drag-and-drop MP3 files with no problem and they play just as I intended.
I was concerned about not being able to update any firmware without resorting to downloading on a Windows machine, but according to the SanDisk website, a firmware update for the e250 is available as a MacOSX download. There does not yet appear to be an equivalent download for the e280. Perhaps later?
As I said, I have only mainly used the device for listening to an audio book, so I cannot discount possible future problems with some of the other features.
Why did I choose the Sansa over iPod? Dollar-for-dollar is seemed to offer more, and people on various audio book forums had expressed their satisfaction with it.

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