Digital music and portable digital music players have transformed our listening experience. Now a well-known company called SanDisk is offering a new twist to purchasing and listening to digital music. Their slotMusic Player plays microSD cards which you can fill yourself or you can purchase with DRM-free albums pre-loaded. It is a unique idea that combines the old-fashioned “buying a record or CD” with the new iPod-like way of listening to music. We took a look at the slotMusic Player and slotMusic cards to check out the pros and cons of this new way of packaging and listening to digital music.

As shown in Figure 1, the slotMusic Player comes encased in a hard plastic shell, which is somewhat difficult to open. Once you have cut through the heavy plastic, you will find the slot music player, a pair of typical hard round ear buds, and  a “Let’s get playing” set of cards which give visual instructions on using the player, as shown in Figure 2. There is also a small adapter.

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Figure 1: The slotPlayer in the package.

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Figure 2: The contents of the box.

The adapter is very tiny. It measures in at 1” x ½” x 1/8” (25.4 x 12.7 x 3.17 mm), but it is quite useful. The adapter is shown in Figure 3 with a microSD card. You simply put the SD card in one end of the adapter and plug the other end into the USB port on your computer.

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Figure 3: The SD micro card/USB adapter.