I haven't exactly had a great deal of luck with mp3 players, but last night was a new low--I've never wanted so badly to huck a piece of hardware across the room. And I might have done it too, but I knew that so small a piece of metal and plastic would lack sufficient crunch to satisfy my tech-rage!
I used to have an ipod Shuffle. Now, Abby has it. Which is fine, she actually uses it on a regular basis, whereas I only donned it when I had aspirations towards exercising regularly, something that wears off after a few weeks. So I've been without an mp3 player for a while, but then one showed up on Woot--a 1G off-brand mp3 player for $10. I figured "what the hell, I'll try it". Yesterday, it arrived.
Now, the appeal of this to me was that it was multi-platform, it had a simple drag-and-drop interface (no need to load up iTunes, which is bloatware, by the way), and would work with a variety of formats, including mp4's, FLAC's, WMA's, in addition to the ubiquitous mp3. I loaded up two recent album purchases (Moby and Gnarls Barkley), the NIN album that came out yesterday, and Radiohead's "In Rainbows", since I'll be seeing them in concert in a week.
Now this is where I freely admit that I'm a dinosaur. I like to listen to whole albums. I would never be able to fit my music collection into a 1G ipod (not at the resolution I like to listen, anyway), but I can put maybe 10 albums worth of hi-res musicness and be happy as a clam. So I gave "In Rainbows" a run. At first the sound quality was pretty shitty, but I soon determined that it was the crappy little white ear buds that came with the player (yes, it has white ear buds, it sooooo wants to be an ipod). Whatever, I have better headphones and nothing says "mug me" like white ear buds.
Then, on track 2 of NIN's The Slip, I got a file error. Correction, I got a horrific ear-splitting noise (even by the standards of someone who listens to NIN) which the mp3 player told me was a file error. But the rest of the album played fine. Then, it went back to "In Rainbows".
WTF? What happened to the other two albums? I had ripped them specifically to listen to them on my new mp3 player, and they weren't there. When I plugged it into the USB slot, it showed them. I could use my laptop to play them from the mp3 player, but the player didn't seem to recognize them.
After some mind-numbing and time-consuming trouble-shooting attempts, I read the manual. Which was no help. It was not written in consumer-speak, and it was nothing but instructions--no explanation or description of what features actually were, just how to turn them on. But I was able to figure out a few things. This device isn't Mac-friendly. It works, but it doesn't like it. Second, the NIN track that wouldn't play seems to just be glitchy with respect to that player. Whatever, shit happens sometimes. The Radiohead and (other) NIN tracks worked because they were mp3's downloaded (legally, I might add) from their sites. The Moby and GB discs were mp4's that I had ripped using iTunes (again, legally purchased albums here) and either the player can't read them, even though it ought to, or it can and I just can't figure out how to make it.
Options. Well, since this was designed with Windows in mind, why not try it on a Windows machine? Our desktop has XP, and I have a CD-ripper/encoder (also legally purchased for legal uses). So I started setting that up, but then I remembered that my encoder is bricked. Well, not bricked bricked, but pretty bricked. It won't encode mp3's at a higher resolution than 56k, and I can't listen to music at 56k. Seriously. The really fucked-up thing is that it used to work just fine, I could rip at 192 or even at CD quality, and why not? After all, I PURCHASED THE LICENSE! But at some point in the last few years it downgraded itself--it's still unlocked and licensed (because I still have access to features that aren't in the demo), but the one feature I actually want has been removed, probably under pressure from record labels. And that really chaps my ass.
What to do now? Abby doesn't want to install the latest version of winamp, and it's her computer, so I'll go along with it. The mp3 encoder (again, legally purchased) on my Mac won't read mp4's. I suppose I could open the mp4's or even the files directly off the CD using Peak (again legally purchased), save them at WAV's and then use my mp3 encoder. But that's a 10 minute process all to be able to listen to a 3 minute song. And it's not what Peak is for. Peak is for CD authoring, and it tends to add blank space to tracks which, while useful when CD authoring, disrupts the flow of an album when you're CD-ripping.
So what can I do? Fire up BitTorrent I suppose and try to find the albums that I want to listen to. Not that I've done that yet, but it's awfully tempting. All the proprietary nonsense going on with iTunes and CD's is doing nothing, repeat nothing, to slow or stop illegal file sharing. It is, however, preventing me from legally enjoying music using applications and hardware that I paid for. It is, in fact, compelling me to use illegal means.
This is bullshit.
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