Adventures with my first portable music player
My awesome parents got me a neat 8GB Insignia Pilot mp3 player for Christmas, and the thing’s working great. I’ve never had the pleasure of walking around with music blaring in my ears, and now that I have I can understand why I always run into so many detached looking teens with tiny little earbugs plugged into their skulls.
My main issue right now is with regards to playlists. I use iTunes to organize my songs, and I can’t sync from there since iTunes hates not-iPod devices. This isn’t really a problem, since I’ve found a neat little program that converts iTunes-generated xml playlists to wpl playlists for Windows Media Player, which is able to sync with my player. Now the problem lies in WMP, which is just… frustrating. Not as frurating as Rhapsody however, which crashed every 5 seconds. WMP is annoying because it assumes the user is a log and attempts to transfer every single mp3 on your computer on to your device. I know it’s just trying to be nice, but it’s a pain. I’m assuming this can be fixed, but wrangling with WMP is a pain.
There’s another issue with playlists, and that’s on the side of the device itself. When I turn the shuffle feature off, it seems as if the playlist on the device does not retain the organization of the songs, and just organizes them in alphabetical order. This isn’t a huge problem, since I don’t really mind skipping through songs on a shuffled playlist to find what I want to listen to.
All I can do is write negatively, but I’m actually really happy with this. I figure it’ll last me two years– that is, until I’m out of college and employed so I can buy myself a more badass device.
edit: this post is pointless now since I’ve fixed all the problems w
Ah, the playlist issue… @_@;;;; I have a Creative Zen Vision:M 30GB, and it’s stupid when it comes to playlists too. WMP hates it as well.
I eventually just quit using WMP altogether and drag-and-dropped mp3 and wma files to my device’s music folder (with your ordinary Windows files browser… thing. whatever it’s called.) It’s a pain, and then you have to restructure your playlists with the device itself, but it works. Have you tried any form of drag-and-dropping files yet?
Depending on what you’re really looking to do, you could preface each song with a number to designate an order, unless you’ve got different playlists in there using the same songs… And ewww, iTunes and WMP, I do everything through winamp and mass storage device interface, much simpler.
>>Have you tried any form of drag-and-dropping files yet?
I did that first.
I’ve got a Creative Zen 16GB. The playlists are an issue with me too. But that’s the only problem I have with my player. Otherwise it works great.
I got a $15 gift card to iTunes for Christmas. I wish I had gotten $15 for Amazon, because it would be much easier to buy mp3s on there and use WMP to sync them to Sennacherib (my player).
I never bother with playlists, really. All I really do is copy random songs to my iRiver MP3 player. I use iTunes to manage my songs too, so I wrote a program a few years ago to just choose random songs from my library to copy over. It will copy over songs from playlists too, but again, I barely use them. Then I hit shuffle on my player and go.
Google “itunes agent”. Long story short, it makes itunes play nice with non-ipods, and it’s legally free. It makes my life a lot easier when I want to sync an itunes playlist to my sansa fuze.
I read your entry on it, tried it out, and it didn’t really work :(
I’m probably fucking something up. I found out what I did wrong in WMP, and it’s working fine. It pains me to use it, but it works well for syncing shit.
I had a 2GB Sony for ages and while the player itself was great (really compact with a neat clip that allowed me to attach it to the lapel of my jacket) the SonicStage software was awful! It was like an FTP client except certain mp3 files would either fail to transfer or crash it completely, which was a bummer when many of my files were Jrock or anime OSTs from non-CD sources. It fell out of a hole in my pocket when I was down the pub.
So yeah, I’d like to hear more about your new piece of kit since I’m looking for a decent non-iPod mp3 player with good battery life and memory capacity (I have over 9GB of mps on my laptop, and haven’t even backed up my full CD collection yet). Any other recommendations?
I’m not much of a personal tech guy, so I can’t recommend much.
And I was lying about it not retaining the playlist order. It retains it perfectly. I guess when I first imported the stuff everything was just screwed up, or something.
So yeah, this player is perfect. I love it.
mp3 manufacturers need to understand the fact some if not a lot of their products’ users have IQ above room temperature and don’t need a crapton of software to move music from their computer to the player. software should always be optional for the special people while everyone else can choose to just plug it in like any usb drive and just drag and drop. DRAG AND DROP, it doesn’t get more simple!
try mediamonkey. highly rated