An amusing fact is that for quite some time, all Australian airlines classifed all such devices as iPods in their "please turn off all electronic devices" speech, rather than learning that the iPod was a specific instance of a greater class of devices. And yes, the usage of the the word "greater" there was deliberate, as the iPod is a somewhat over-priced, underfeatured and "locked-in" solution. I do not want to be forced to use iTunes (and all associated "bonus features" that get installed without my consultation) or some hacked up iPod manager software to get music on to my MP3 player.
Enter the Sony NWZ-A726. Sure, Sony have been known for some rather poor practices in the past as well, but rather than harping on about previous cases of extremely bad judgement, let's focus on something awesome. Or rather, two things. 1. Drag and Drop. 2. Format support. Sony recently came to the realisation that people just want to be able to plug in a MP3 player and dump their music directly on it without having to use some proprietary software or format. Bravo!
This alone makes it a winner in my book, but even aside from that, it's a really nice MP3 player with good sound quality and excellent earbuds. For once, the things don't try to tear your cartilage apart for the entirety of the time that you're attempting to listen to your music. All I can say is: about freaking time.
Of course, as any Olympic opening ceremony can prove, nothing goes off without a hitch, and my aggravation came in the simple form of plugging the thing into my computer. Doing so abruptly stopped the music that was playing on my PC. Confused, I looked at my screen to find the Winamp (my PC MP3 player of choice) had crashed. Attempting to start it up again resulted in the same abrupt crash.
Unplug MP3 player.
Start Winamp... Winamp starts.
Plug in MP3 player... Winamp dies.
After a few hours of frustration and intermittent swearing, emails and forum posts, I managed to track down the issue to not Sony, but Winamp. A poorly coded dll (pmp_4s.dll) tries to access the portable upon it being plugged in. Since Windows is already trying to talk to the device, Winamp apparently does something "naughty" (great technical term, huh?) when it tries to talk to it, causing Windows to kill Winamp in a rather authoritarian manner, proving once again that - Windows: it doesn't play nice with the other children.
So the solution was to tell Winamp not to try and do more things than it should. Which to be honest, should be a very short list, as I don't really need an MP3 to burn CDs, download album art, set up a sharing network to allow others to remotely access my music collection, be the exclusive tool allowable to upload content to my MP3 player... Sorry, I'd gotten off that high horse several paragraphs ago.
My ideal PC MP3 player does the following:
Plays MP3s.
The End.
You know Amstrad, you wouldn't experience these kinds of problems if you had (1) a Mac and (2) an iPod! ;) Sounds like your Walkman is pretty cool though...
ReplyDeleteI reckon Windows works best when you choose to 'manage stuff yourself', eg. manually dragging and dropping songs into your Walkman. Macs, however, come into their own when you allow the software to automatically manage stuff for you, eg. iTunes and iPods. I think this level of integration is only possible when the hardware and software (including OS) is manufactured by the one vendor, eg. Apple. There is just too much room for stuff to go wrong when you have a wide range of hardware and software vendors (eg. a Windows environment) trying to play nice together, so in this situation I too prefer to get back to basics and just use the core functionality only.
Fair call. Provided you want to work exactly the way that the Mac wants you to, they're great. Unfortunately, I don't always want to work that way. Guess I'm a stubborn little entitlement-monkey.
ReplyDelete