Looking for a good music shop, there's mp3va.com. You don't need any client software, and there aren't any nags about downloading using such things. What's more, the music is insanely cheap from there which at first made me question if the site is really legit, but this company is not based in the US or any surrounding nations so isn't limited to charging a minimum of $0.69, $0.99 or $1.29. What I really like about this site, is that if an album has bonus tracks that aren't released on itunes or google play music, then chances are if you look at mp3va it'll be there. For example, the two bonus tracks in Shinedown's Threat to Survival album weren't on itunes, but are on mp3va.com.

That may have changed.

I just tried to purchase an album today from Amazon, I was never offered the option to not use their downloader, and when I tried to use it, I found it totally inaccessible.

I got them to cancel and refund the order, then, for now, ordered CDs, I'll just rip them to MP3s myself.

Jack,

That site sounds interesting, I'll have to check it out.

Personally, i never had one source for music.  Sometimes I'd get cds, sometimes I'd buy from bandcamp or locally from the people themselves, sometimes I'd do a swap with friends or family members, it was usually a case of working out what I wanted and where to get it than using a specific provider, but then again I don't give a monkey's behind about latest charts or anything like that.

For organization, files and folders and organizing myself has always been my preference, which is as I've said before another reason Itunes got right on my whick, indeed even when I used the Iphone regularly I refuse to buy from one company if I can't play the file on whatever device or whatever program I desire to.
I have some cds (including the soundtrack to final fantasy 7), that are now nearly 20 years old, and which after I digitized them I've played on all sorts of things from sterrios to laptops to my victor and yes even my Iphone when i was using it.

I'll also add Figment, you don't have to keep Itunes around for backups either. Go to settings and Icloud backups, and you can select to backup all your contacts, phone numbers etc, so when you get a new Ios device you can just download streight from the cloud, and of course any aps you pay for and most in ap purchices are backed up to your Apple Id anyway.

I'll say it was good to give Itunes the heave ho, and I've been infinitely happier with my victor stream this last year, despite the extra expense.

Btw, just in case you didn't know the Victor will also stream digital radio stations provided you connect it to wifi. I'll say it's nice to be able to get classic fm.

I'm certainly not getting rid of my Iphone,and while I haven't bothered with the Iphone 6 series (not enough differences from my Iphone 5 to make it worth while), I'll have a look at the 7 series. The aps and games and contacts and other useful stuff is indeed worth it for the Iphone, it's just a shame Apple make things so dam difficult with Itunes, indeed I partly wonder if this is deliberate obstruction, trying to force you to buy stuff through their proprietory program so Apple get their cut instead of letting you be free with your own collection. Then again forced monopoly is very much modern economic practice, Brave new world hear we come!

Getting back to the subject, what put me off the Sansa (aside from it being named after the most annoying character of game of thrones), was the software used for the interface elements and naming of files. While I know you run the program and it effectively records the interface element names and your file names with your sapi voice and then plays them, I didn't like the idea of elements of that program being inaccessible and the recording part being a separate peace of software.
Yes it's a much cheaper option, but at the same time I didn't want to swap one semi usable annoying peace of file transfer software for another hence why I went the hole hog with the Victor stream which has in built tts and will just read off your file and folder names by default.

My only issue with the stream, is firstly there is a limited choice of voices and I don't know if there is a way to get additional ones, (I'd much rather have Realspeak daniel or Orphius Alan), and secondly I don't seem to be able to change the voice speed without changing the book/audio playback speed, though in fairness I probably ought to phone Humanware tech support and ask about both of these, sinse at least with the speed I'm fairly sure there is something I'm missing.

I may have answered the question of a media file manager. I remembered seeing one on one of the may audio games sites I visited when I first learned of audio games for the blind Anyway, it looks interesting.

http://www.braillesoft.net/doswin.htm

The only SD cards that need to be specially formatted are the 64GB ones. That was my understanding when I bought my Clip Plus, anyway. Incidentally, I love that player too. I've had mine since sometime in July, and I love being able to copy and paste whatever I want onto the thing without needing any extra software.

I don't care for the folder structure, though. I really wish it had a feature like the original Braille Plus did where it would automatically organize your files. That way, if I wanted to listen to a specific song, I would be able to locate it by artist. I know I could have created artist folders manually, but that would have been a pain. And 95% of the time, I just put my player on shuffle and listen to whatever comes up anyway, so it's not a deal breaker, just a minor annoyance.

At Figment, I use the regular Amazon site when I purchase digital music. At one time, you couldn't even buy digital music on the accessible site, so it's out of habit that I go there. maybe you can try the regular site next time you buy a song or album, and see if that works. They really have improved the accessible site quite a bit recently. You never used to be able to change your payment details, or get specs for products, but now you can, so, unless I'm buying music, I use the accessible site for everything else now.

I tend to agree with you there. When did they start allowing digital purchases from the accessible site, anyway?

@Figment, when I spoke of not changing the voice speed on the Victor, I was talking about with the interface only. You can speed up everything, but it will also speed up playback of audio files as well as the speaking of elements on the interface such as file names, names of controls and menus etc. I however don't want my playback of files sped up at all, but would like to speed up the interface voice a little, though in fairness as I said I haven't  actually asked humanware about this.
In all other aspects I'm very happy with the victor. You can just bang whatever folder structure you like on there and navigation is easy, it tells you what level of navigation your in so you know folders and subfolders and also speaks the names, so whether I stick on an author folder with series subfolders and suboflders for the individual books, or music folders organized by whatever way it'll work.

All you need to do is shove what folders and subfolders you want in the right directory, or if you download them, they'll get stuck in a directory by default.
The two directories I use most are $music and $otherbooks (ie, not dazy format or something else).

The only principle difference is that the music directory has a shuffle function and supports m3u playlists if you want them, while the books directory categorizes it's folder structure as books and will stop playback after each as well as keep your position (explaining this sounds probably far more complicated than using it).

While I'll agree the Victor was expensive, I've certainly been very happy with the thing, particularly a lot of the little extra functions such as being able to get the total time of a playing book, (or music track for that matter), as well as the sleep mode and of course the fact it saves your position in any and all folders at a time.

As regards library functions, well as I said the victor will support m3u playlists and if I could be bothered I could make these with winamp, but I personally have never really seen the point of all that library mallarchy myself, one reason I still am a big fan of winamp which has it if you want but not if you don't, and will just play any file or folder I want when I want. This again is something I don't like in Itunes, sinse personally I prefer just organizing my music and audio collections myself with folders and subfolders much as you'd put cds on a shelf, rather than leaving it to someone or something else.

Personally, if I want to play something, usually I prefer to play the hole album/peace of music/performance/soundtrack rather than nitpicking bits, and on the occasions I use shuffle, I'm more likely to say shuffle all my blackmore's night or bellowhead collection than want a random mixture, ---- indeed if I want a random mixture I usually just bang my entire music folder (all 100 or so gb of it), on shuffle which can be hilarious, getting Bach followed by Epic metal followed by music from Classic Nes games followed by the beatles followed by some experimental game soundtrack remixes .

Dark,

100 GB? How big an SD card will the Victor Reader Stream accept? I thought it was 32 GB.

Thats good news that the Victor Reader Stream supports m3u playlists, because the Brailsoft Music Categorizer can make them.

I'm not that big on play lists, but I do use a small number of them for grouping purposes. For example most of my music is individual tracks, there are also some albums too. One of the most common things I do is create a playlist called favorites which has all those individual tracks in it. When I play the favorites playlist I always put it in shuffle mode. Many of my albums are meant to be listened to straight through rather than randomly listening to individual tracks, so I exclude them from the favorites play list.

Some of my albums are several discs long or I have several albums I like to play together.

For example, Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds is best listened to straight through, but it takes two discs. I use a playlist for it that has both discs in it so when I listen to it I don't have to have the media player play the second disc after the first disc finishes. I realize I could edit the ID tags to make it look like one big disc, but I find making a playlist is easier.

I also have the original soundtracks to the first three Star Wars movies, they are three separate albums. When I listen to them, I like to put all three albums in order into a playlist.

Ah, now I understand, and I agree, I'd like to speed up the voice when it's just reading the Victor's user interface, but would want the media playback to be at normal speed. It could be a feature we'll have to ask for. It would seem to me to be a natural feature Victor users would want.

A while back, I looked at a MP3 player that claimed it was made for the blind and visually impaired, that turned out to be some commercial brand of MP3 player with RockBox applied to it. While listening to an audio demo of it they mentioned that until you create a spoken label for them, it just spells the folder and track names. My opinion was that if it had been truly made for the blind and visually impaired, it would have had text to speech software in it to read the folder and track name. That it lacked that, turned me off on it immediately.

At Bucklee12, the program you're talking about is called RB Clip. Lots of people swear by it, but I don't care for it at all. It creates files that are spoken by your TTS of choice, but those take up much-needed space on the player or micro SD card for what I see as very little gain. sure, it might be a little awkward to listen to your file names being spelled out, but I would much rather have that than have a whole bunch of space taken up by wave files that just speak the names of files. Now, if it actually read out ID3 tags, that would be a whole other ball game, and I would make that sacrifice.
I've also never gotten it to work, though to be fair, I did only try it once. When I tried to run the program, it crashed after I imported the folder I wanted to have spoken. That obviously didn't impress me.

Brailsoft's Music Categorizer didn't last long here.

I followed their instructions for setting it up and starting the mp3 scan for files. It gave me an error about a file not having an m3e header or something like that without telling me what file it was. Then it gave me a user interface with nothing but buttons on it and no list of my music files.

If that's all it is, it's not worth the $10 their asking for it. So it got uninstalled.

The search for an easy to use and accessible music file manager continues.