February 1, 2007
Dear Everyone:
Happy Birthday, “Alice”!!!
Did I mention what Santa brought me for Christmas? An MP3 Player. It was just what I wanted.
Back before the
I decided to forego the iPod because I’d given “Jeannie” one for Christmas the year before and we still hadn’t figured out how to make the darn thing work. (I did finally take the iPod and software and load them onto my own laptop. After some hunting around in “Help”, I was finally able to reset the device to the original factory settings and voila! it worked. On the other hand, “Jeannie” and I have not tried to load any more music to it since then.)
I visited one of the Big Electronics Warehouse Stores (BEWS) and looked around and asked some questions. Based on this, I selected a 4-gigabyte model from a fairly reliable manufacturer.
Once all the excitement of Christmas died down, I decided it was time to install the software from the CD that came with the player. This is when I discovered that all the CD did was direct you to the manufacturer’s website to download the latest version of the software.
This make sense when you consider that software is constantly being updated. Getting it from the “source” is the best method. Unless your Internet Service Provider (ISP) is a dial-up connection. I tried about a half-dozen times to download the application. Each time it would take about 16 minutes to get to 99% completed, then just hang.
Finally I decided to go up to “Jeannie’s” place the next weekend. “Jeannie” has a cable-modem setup, which is much faster. I figured I could plug her cable into my laptop and take it from there. Only her ISP has something in place to prevent just that. I couldn’t get to the Internet on my machine, only on hers.
That’s when “Jeannie” reminded me that there was an Office Warehouse Store (OWS) just a few miles from her place. I drove up, picked out a half-gigabyte universal serial bus (USB) memory “stick” for half what I paid for one the year before (memory is so cheap now), and returned to “Jeannie’s” place.
With the memory stick in place, I was able to download the application in a matter of minutes. When I got home, I placed the memory stick into my laptop (to the computer, it’s just another physical drive) and installed the software on the stick. As long as the stick is in the USB port, the application runs just fine.
However, I quickly discovered several things: You have to be on the Internet when you run the software; the player only had room for two gigabytes of music; and you have to “subscribe” to a service for $14.95 per month.
The reason you have to be on the Internet is because that’s where the system goes to find information about the CD that you want to transfer to the player. This make sense when you think about it. Why load a huge library of information on every CD ever produced on your computer, taking up huge quantities of memory? The library would be obsolete before you got it.
Instead, they keep the constantly-updated library on their website. When you load a CD into the drive, the system finds the unique identifier and displays the artist, tracks, etc. And since you may want to transfer CDs anytime, it ensures that you continue to subscribe to their service. You might even want to download music from their site, since that’s the way it’s supposed to work.
But all I wanted to do was transfer the music I already have from my CDs to the player. Only problem was two gigabytes wasn’t enough for all my CDs. That’s when I realized that the player came “pre-loaded” with “sample” music. In fact, half the available memory was already taken.
The good news is that you can delete the sample music if you want. Hip-Hop was the first to go, followed quickly by Country Western, “classic” Rock, and even their choices in genuine classics. By deleting all the manufacturer’s playlists, I cleared out another gigabyte. But that still wasn’t enough.
I remembered that this particular make and model had an expansion slot that would allow me to increase the memory by adding a “micro card”. Back to the BEWS. Yes, they had the micro card. Yes, it would fit into my player.
But when I used it, the amount of memory was still four gigabytes. Then I went hunting in “Help” and discovered that while yes, they had the expansion slot and the card would fit, the “software capability” to recognize and use the expanded memory was still in the development stage and would involve an upgrade at some future time (stay tuned to that subscription at $14.95/month.)
Nevertheless, I persevered and just last Monday, I figured out how to get into something they called “Channels” that contained the rest of the preloaded music. By deleting all the “Channels”, I was able to transfer the rest of my CDs into the player. Now I’m happy.
I will continue to “subscribe” and log onto their site for a few months, in hopes that the expansion memory upgrade will come through. In the meantime, having the player at work really helps me to concentrate. It effectively drowns out the casual conversations and other “ambient noise” that is so prevalent in our “space standards” (i.e., cubicles.) I even listened to my music while flying to and from “Hobby” last week.
I think my next acquisition may be even better noise-canceling earphones.
Love, as always,
Pete
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