OK. I've had more than a week with this little wonder. Now it is time to weigh in on both its usefulness, as well as strategies for its use.When I had my iRiver IR-899, I had a nifty mp3 player with 1GB of memory, and FM radio, and a voice recorder with a built in condenser mike. I don't listen to music, but as a podcast device, it was awesome, easy to use, and the PC interface software was the greatest.
This device, due to the extra space and the video capabilities, has seduced me into trying to do a lot of new things. This has lead to mistakes being made by the user (me), and a reassessment of what I wanted this thing for.
To begin with, I loaded a lot of songs from my CD collection: about 100. I liked the idea of having Al Green, Marvin Gaye, James Taylor, and even Neil Diamond, at my fingertips when the mood struck me. However, my podcasts were mixed in with them inexplicably, and I had to skip songs manually to get to the next one. This caused me to lose the set-it-and-forget-it convenience of the old method. Now, I just load a few songs that I don't mind interspersing with my podcasts, although they still get loaded on the device in an unpredictable order.
Part of the problem is that the management software, Rhapsody, is more interested in dragging you to their music store to buys stuff than in helping you manage your playlist. In fact, it cares not a lick about your preferences. I'd like to figure out how to get Windows Media Player to manage it, but this "WindowsPlaysForSure" device does not appear to speak to WMP. It wants to be managed by the proprietary music store software, Rhapsody. A pox on them.
Videos need a separate software, ArcSoftMediaConverter2, in order to convert the file and to move it to Insignia. That is not so bad, but it keeps bugging me to register the software, even though I already did, and I can't make it stop. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
It's also important to know that although the player will save your place in a long audiobook, if you switch to another book, you have to start the other book all over again. And if you synch the player with your computer, THAT will make you lose your place. So, plan ahead...
I will continue to tell you about this player later. In the meantime, if anyone has found a way to use other management software other than "Crapsody", let me know...
2 comments:
Windows media player lets you load and sync music and videos but not pitures and u can always open it and drag and drop so yout not limited to crapsody
You're right. I was just not very patient with the process. It sometimes takes awhile for the player to be recognized. Even that Music Match, that usually gloms onto everything it can, ignores Insignia. Odd.
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