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.