Further to this whole MP3 player thing.
We got Lisa's sister a Sandisk Sansa M240 for Christmas. She opened it today, and then I went to show her how to use it.
Throw in the included mini-CD (8cm)... watch it fall out of the vertically mounted CD-ROM tray three times in a row. Have it install the software... which turns out to be a WMP upgrade. Wow, thanks for putting all that R&D into a useful app for ripping and loading your product. Ah, well... I'll just give her a copy of CDeX later.
Hit the Rip tab, get her to give me her The Open Door CD, rip the first two tracks to WMA as a test. As stated in the instruction manual, treat it like a USB drive, drop the files onto the MP3 player... disconnect, attach to headphones... shows both files are on the player, but refuses to play them saying that it needs to be synced.
Flip to the sync tab (which, by the way, defaults to trying to update the player with anything remotely resembling an audio file, plus any TXT files that could sound like dance music if given half a chance)... cancel all that silliness, change the parameters of what gets synced...
Repeat over and over until I get frustrated enough that I see myself as a British nanny shaking the life out of this little plastic piece of crap.
I call Lisa in, usually she's got a better handle on how the great unwashed do things without custom applications for every project. She smugly says she's figured it out after 15 minutes, and shows me how you create a new sync profile... I congratulate her and suggest she go through it one more time with her sister so she's got it. So she does... trying to add one more song from the album onto the player... which works... and it deletes the previous track she just loaded.
Honestly, Sandisk... I know DRM is a big thing these days, but I've etched and soldered a PCB for an audio digitizer for the C64 and wrote assembly code to play back the resulting audio file... if I can't figure out the hoops to jump through to load songs onto your player, you've failed... you should have just packaged a tiny leprechaun in the back of the package that would jump out, bite me in the gonads and defecate on the floor. I might have had a better out of box experience.
Bren R.
