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Confessions of a digital media junkie

By Kathleen Maher

If that Amazon bill ever gets into the wild in our household I am toast. Ditto that Paypal history.

When it comes to buying media players I just can’t help myself. As readers of this column know, I am in serious love with the Creative ZenW media player. I take it with me everywhere and I have given serious thought to leaving my computer at home and just taking the media player. Why not? I can listen to music, use it for storage, play videos, record podcasts, play the radio. It synchs with Outlook so I have my calendar and appointments and ... okay, it’s not -really a working tool. Nevertheless I love feeding it movies and music, making videos for it, and dressing it. Yep, I have bought it a case and screen protector.

The Zen Vision:W follows on a long line of devices that I’ve gotten and they all receive the same reverence—when they’re new. There’s the Zen Micro, a cute little thing that holds 4 GBytes of music and synchs with my Napster To Go account. I also have a 30-GByte Nomad that I had been routinely sending all my CDs to until my computer ceased to recognize the player. Before that I had a 60-GByte player that I spent months nurturing with content only to leave the damn thing in a cab in Beijing. And then, for those Audible files I have a Rio Forge bought through eBay for 35 bucks. (And, this isn’t the first Rio player I’ve bought. I’ve had several variations on the Forge and a Chiba player. The Chiba died after about 6 months but all the Forge players are doing fine. I tend to rely on one of the Sport Forges because of their adeptness with Audible.) A quick check at eBay reveals that the bargains on digital players have just gotten better. They’re practically giving away 5-GByte Rio Carbons. Rio may have stopped making players but they sure must have made a lot because eBay sellers seem to have a never-ending supply of “new” players. Personally, I’m thinking about branching out to Archos and iRiver players because the deals look pretty good there too. Besides I worry about taking My Precious out on the road just in case some evil cab driver steals it.

The point of all this though is that I know plenty about non-iPod media players. If you don’t mind fooling with things, a non-iPod player is almost always a much better deal than an iPod, but of course not everyone likes fooling with things and I’ve found myself going round the bend more than a few times when something goes wrong. The Rios have their ups and downs. Sometimes, if I use the Rio software when the moon is waning and the tides are high, the internal database gets corrupted and I have to erase the thing, losing all my playlists and bookmarks—a really annoying turn of events when halfway through a long Audible book. Like I said, the PC has suddenly turned its nose up at the Zen Touch and I’ve had to reformat the Zen Micro a few times to get it back in the good graces of Windows. In all cases it’s difficult to manage tunes on the player—to say create playlists on the fly, etc.

The Rio software is functional—sometimes—but you never know when it’s just going to trash the database and no one is going to upgrade software for a dead product line. Creative’s software is frankly awful. Now, I know that all the companies are thwarted by Microsoft’s diabolical habit of sending out security patches right when everything seems to be going hunky dory, but hey, it’s not like it hasn’t happen about 200 times now, so that companies with continuing products out there like Creative might have developed a strategy to deal with Microsoft’s little tricks.

A while back, when the Zen Nomad got sick, I bought software from Red Chair to manage the player. It was great but then the player the player went away and eventually the computer too went away—all things pass, especially computers around here.

However, just recently I gathered all my players around and started fooling with them and I realized that they all have their charms and that it would be nice to use them rather than always take the Vision:W and risk dropping it or giving it to a cab driver or something. So, I went back to the well and bought the Red Chair software again.

Notmad from Red Chair Software

I bought the $35 version that supports all models. You might want to think twice about this option. I found that it doesn’t work all that great, especially if you’ve got one device that has newer Plays for Sure drivers and an older device that has Plays When It Damn Well Feels Like It drivers. The software has a little switch that tells it which kind of drivers you have but at the moment I’m not sure so that the software tolerates users using the software with both kinds of players. I was told I had to authenticate the player, and when I tried it suggested I buy more software, which, of course, makes paying extra for the universal version kind of silly. There may be a fix for this, support hasn’t answered as of this writing (which is fair, it’s the weekend).

However, the really great thing about this software is that it makes the player so much easier to use. Now, finally, I can create playlists on the player. Microsoft’s Media Player wants me to -create a playlist on the PC and then send it over. That’s just not how I work. For one thing it’s nice to just separate all the music tracks from the spoken word tracks and Christmas tracks. (Is there anything worse than hearing a rousing version of “Jingle Bell Rock” in July?) That tends to be an ongoing project as one adds spoken word tracks and changes around music tracks.

Now, I believe I did mention that Creative’s software is pretty awful and so is the outdated Rio stuff, but I should also add the Napster’s software has some idiotic traits as well. If you want to delete a playlist you can but that does not delete the tracks. They have to be deleted separately. But hey, how am I supposed to remember what those tracks were once I delete the playlist that actually lists the tracks?

Notmad software lets you take advantage of Windows’ logical file structure and deal with your player as if it’s just another drive. Its very simple and obvious approach which is great when you tend to fill up your player, and empty it, and refill it—a logical usage model for subscription services. This is especially easy to do when you’re working with subscription services.

Red Chair’s product for the Creative players is aptly called Notmad (making fun of Creative’s Nomad brand, they also offer Anapod for iPods, RioRad for Rio players, iRivium for iRiver, etc.).

The software has made my players fun to use again. They had been shoved off to the back of the drawer and now they’re back. Once again I am wasting astounding amounts of time crafting playlists to accompany me on my runs or to get me through long airplane rides. The big drawback is that I’m now tempted to bring several players with me on the road. My Vision:W for movies, the Rio for audio books and running, and somewhat arbitrarily the Zen Micro because it happens to have the most playlists on it.

Summary

This may be a really silly time for such a review as we all prepare for the great transition to Vista, and, I devoutly hope, many of the problems we’ve endured during the waning days of XP will be fixed, but there is a larger point to be made. Or rather, there are two larger points to be made. The first is, why did such a software have to be invented? After all, all Red Chair really does is open up the player’s file system to Windows. Unfortunately, product manufacturers want to dazzle us with their own software, and to do so they’ll sometimes create some completely useless utility that doesn’t even do what it’s supposed to do well, let alone add functionality. Many iPod users in fact are coming to the realization that there just might be a better way to do things than iTunes, hence the existence of Red Chair’s Anapod.

However, the second point is that companies like Red Chair are what is best about open architectures. Small, independent companies can look at a problem and create an answer without worrying about a whole giant infrastructure of legacy products, armies of users, and a board of directors. They provide product designers, at least the few who seem to actually care, with a blueprint to build better products.

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