How to get the most from your Sansa Connect

Posted by steve_raymond, May 3, 2007 at 3:30 am, in Yahoo! Music Unlimited. 9 Comments

There continues to be a lot of interest in the Sansa Connect portable player (SanDisk Connect Does Stuff You Wish Apple’s iPod Would) that we released this month with our partners SanDisk and Zing. We’re glad that the product has created some excitement for what’s next in the digital music – namely access to your music wherever and whenever with a payment model that maximizes your ability to rock out. We agree that we are turning it up to ELEVEN.

The biggest ask we’ve seen from reviewers and early customers is to be able to search the YMU catalog directly from the device. We hear you, its coming. Its actually not a trivial feature to “get right” from a usability standpoint – how do you find an artist or track you are looking for (out of a catalog of over TWO MILLION tracks) on an itty-bitty screen with no keyboard or mouse? So rather than bringing a frustrating product to market we decided to KISS (Keep it simple stupid) and release the product with its current rich feature set.

There is a reason why we felt we could make that decision: you don’t need to be able to search for specific artists, albums, or tracks to fill the device up with great music that you love – which is, after all, the goal.

You just think you do cause thats how you’ve always done it, until now.

It’s MUCH easier and arguably more entertaining to use Yahoo’s recommendation engine and the device’s mixlisting capabilities to fill the device up. After you have created a half-dozen or so mixlists, the device will leverage the YMU subscription and its own Wifi capabilities to keep the device filled up with fresh content based on your personal preferences. Trust me, its amazing, and your boring old iPod will start seeming very dated (almost brickish) after the lightbulb goes on. We haven’t talked up the technology much until now cause its so mindblowing, and really only suited for power users like you. Here’s what you do:

  1. Go to the Settings>Music&Mixes>Mixes&Recommendations menu and set to 50% of capacity.
  2. Also set Autodelete to “ON” from the Settings>Music&Mixes>Auto-Delete menu
  3. If you have time, its helpful to have identified some playlists on YMU that you really love and to have rated a reasonable amount of music. A couple of playlists that are working great for me are Like Ryan Adams and Mojo 70-71. But this step is totally optional because you can make mixlists off of particular songs, genres, etc.
  4. Start creating mixlists from the Zing menu on the device.
  5. Create 1 or 2 based on existing playlists by navigating to Get More Music > My Yahoo! Playlists. Highlight a playlist, press the Zing button and select “Make a mix like this”
  6. Create a few based on a genre by navigating to Get More Music>Yahoo! Music Recommendations and drilling into the genre tree. Once you have a genre selected press the Zing button and select “Make a mix like this”. This will have the added benefit of having the seed artists filtered through your personal ratings.
  7. Listen to a Launchcast station and when a song comes on that you like press the Zing button and “Create a mixlist based on this song”
  8. Find some other ways to create mixlists.
  9. Start listening to the mixlists (they are saved in your Music Library on the device)

What happens next? Well, the device is going to do everything it can to keep those mixlists fresh for you. After you have listened to the tracks in a mixlist it’s going start deleting tracks you’ve already listened to and putting new ones on there based on the mixlist criteria and your personalization preferences (based on ratings) as well as some fancy backend algorithms. As long as the device is fairly well charge its going to try to do this housekeeping whenever it notices a WiFi connection that works for it. Like when you are asleep. When you least expect it, expect it.

Creating and modifying mixlists is so easy (and the music is so good!) that if you are like me, this is primarily how you are going to choose what to listen to for your bike ride to work etc. Maximizes control and personalization with a minimum of keystrokes and fuss. We’re thinking features like this are the way people will to interact with music and contact on connected devices in The Future.
For now if you really really need to find a particular track or album you are going to have to do it the old fashioned way and drag it over from your PC. Or you can create a playlist and use the WiFi on the device to get it. And pretty soon you’ll wake up and the device will have updated the firmware over WiFi and you’ll be able to search the catalog in a form factor appropriate way. But I bet you don’t use that feature anywhere near as much as you use mixlists.

Steve Raymond
Yahoo! Entertainment

P.S. Check out Pogue’s comment at the end of this. He gets it. I can’t believe people write reviews of reviews. But I also couldn’t believe that people posted video of themselves opening a box.

P.P.S If you are a Connect User join this group.

9 Comments »

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

  1. [...] Sansa Connect: Discover new music & an upcoming feature 02May07 Yahoo! Music Blog ยป How to get the most from your Sansa Connect [...]

    Pingback by Sansa Connect: Discover new music & an upcoming feature « Project HTPC — May 3, 2007 #

  2. I’d love to give the sansa a try but the Yahoo! Music Jukebox is windows only, and I don’t have a windows machine (nor do I want one). When will Yahoo! Music Jukebox support linux or Mac OS?

    I’d like to hear more about your recommender, in particular how Yahoo evaluates the recommender. You say ‘trust me, it’s amazing’ but, I really don’t know you or your music tastes. What if I don’t like the music the recommender puts on the device? So please tell me more about how you decide that your recommender is ‘amazing’.

    - Paul

    Comment by lamere — May 3, 2007 #

  3. Is yahoo ever going to fix the Yahoo Music Jukebox? Ever since the last update, on 3 different computers, it has the exact same problem, it keeps restarting the program when you exit. The only way to escape the loop of restarting is to task manager the 3 yahoo processes, but even then, it will sometimes just start back up for no reason a few minutes later.

    I can’t use the contact us page in yahoo help because they changed it and now it requires an activex control. At first, with firefox, it didn’t work at all, but I tried it and installed the activex control in IE and submitted my problem, but it came back with an error and did not submit the problem.

    So, yahoo broke the program AND they broke the only way for people to say there is a problem. The people that make YMJ must not actually USE it because otherwise they would notice this huge horrible error in the program that keeps it restarting.
    The version on all 3 of my pcs is 2.1.0.174 and it did not restart before on any of them, its this version! Please someone get this message to Yahoo so they can actually fix it!!!

    Comment by jupiterssj4 — May 3, 2007 #

  4. The new features you describe are great news for people who have such a device, and for all those that do not we can certainly appreciate the zeal Yahoo has in creating new innovations. But at the same time, I’d hate to see Yahoo keep ‘adding extra chrome and cupholders’ and forget about the engine itself. The biggest selling point for me to select Yahoo over other on-line sources was cost. Now that I’ve used the service for quite some time, I get a bit jealous over what the other providers have for only a few dollars more. Even with the latest build, the Yahoo player has some significant areas for improvement (slowness, stability issues, memory usage), most have which have been enumerated here before. I hope that Yahoo understands that a portion of it’s customer base does not share the same energy level for new features (lyrics being another example), but would rather have a quality product first, then work on the bells and whistles. Don’t get me wrong, Yahoo Music is a great service, with a great price-point, but there is still work to be done to the core product, and I’d hate to see too much of the resources spent on a niche rather than the core.

    Comment by Jamie — May 3, 2007 #

  5. Regarding the issue of Yahoo! Music Jukebox — there was a conflict with Y! Toolbar (and also 3rd party plugins) that caused this. The latest version of YMJ should have fixed it. (ans also make sure you ave the very latest toolbar version)

    http://music.yahoo.com/jukebox

    Sorry for the trouble that caused..

    Comment by emayoh — May 4, 2007 #

  6. I completely agree with Jamie. It’s sad that new product announcements are met with complaints but it goes to show how upset longtime users are with the main YMJ.

    Even media players from 1995 can remember column preferences and icon view V. list view.

    I was enticed by the cheap price for 2 years of YMU. Now I am starting to feel like I am getting what I paid for.

    No features have been added. All we get are bug fixes and a service that doesn’t compare to Rhapsody or Urge.

    YMJ 3.0 needs to come out sooner than later and work well.

    Bios, reviews, recommendations, editorial content like topical playlists and celebrity interviews.
    Lyrics, videos.
    PHONE SUPPORT.

    I am severely disappointed with the service thus far.

    Comment by resource — May 4, 2007 #

  7. Thanks for the valueble Sansa Connect useability post. This certainly helped me as I was still sort of fumbling around in the dark.

    This is one cool device and even though I’ve only had it for a week I have already gotten more enjoyment out of it than any other MP3 player type device. I am also big into Sat Radio and I have decided that I am at least going to cancel XM. I’ll probably keep SIRIUS to use in the car and for other programming not available via Yahoo.

    Zing had done a very good job on the interface in terms of stability. Looking forward to a long term relationship with Yahoo Music and my Sansa Connect Device.

    What can I say, I’ve been Zinged and Yahoo’ed.. LOL

    Also you guys complaining about YMJ, man there is a time and a place and this isn’t it.

    Comment by OTACORB — May 28, 2007 #

  8. I’m loving the Sansa Connect. But it’s months later and still none of that promised Catalog Search… any news?

    Comment by FredFredrickson — October 16, 2007 #

  9. cool! i seems to be toooo late :)

    Comment by LTO Ultrium Tape — February 16, 2010 #

Leave a comment

XHTML: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

Powered by WordPress. Theme based on Pool theme design by Borja Fernandez.
Entries and comments feeds.
^Top^