Santa got my daughter an MP3 player for Christmas.  No not an Ipod, those are overpriced pieces of nothing that I need, but that is another rant.  The one she got was an RCA.  Probably not the best but there are loads of worse ones out there.

She has been using it for a while now and having no problems.  We have been using Windows Explorer to drag and drop songs on the thing and it has worked just fine.  The other day she came to me looking for a song that they had heard at school to put on her machine.

For someone working on a bachelor degree in technology online this kind of task might have been fun.

After some balking about how she wasn’t getting her room cleaned and I wasn’t getting the house cleaned I relented and googled the song.  It was a remix of a popular song that was now a pro-reading thing.  I like reading.  I like the fact that she likes to read.  A song about reading seemed like a good thing.

Come to find out, this song only exists on You Tube.  Here it is.

Not too bad, so I save the video to my computer.  Should be able to put it right on her player because it has video.  Oh no….It couldn’t possibly be that easy.  Turns out there is a proprietary video type for RCA and its parent company Audiosucks Audiovox.  So I look up how to convert this video.  There is a program that comes hard wired into the player called RCA Easy Rip that gives you the capability. If you have a version that will work.

I didn’t.  More google.  Download new program that will work with Vista.  Install.  Crash system.  reboot.  Install.  Seems to work but won’t convert video with sound.  video only.  What a Piece of Crap!  We gave up for the moment on the video.  Now there was some other songs she wanted on her player.

I had the program up so I decided to use it.  The &$#^ing piece of worthless crap ate 99% system clock resources!  I couldn’t do anything while it was loading like 8 songs on her player.  I couldn’t even stop it becasue it says it will damage the player.  Tell you what, I uninstalled that little mother as soon as it released the hostage system resources.

And then I rebooted because my system was slow.  When it started up again, there was another program that was piggybacked onto the EasyRip!  This one automatically locks up your computer on startup looking for updates to the software or the firmware of the player.  It was a catch 22 for a while because this thing was taking all of the system resources again and not letting things like the internet connection get through so it couldn’t update to save it because it was taking up the resources needed to access.

I finally got that uninstalled and everything nearly back to normal now.  All I have to say is, Come on RCA you are a big name that has been around for a long time.  You of all people should realize that a flashy app is worthless if it takes you back to the days of linear computing where everything is loaded one bit at a time and it takes freaking forever.  Multi-tasking has been around for a while.

Maybe you could find a nice 3rd party application that would solve everyones problems once and for all.  Or, heaven forbid, make the thing open source so the hackers can have a go at it and make it useful.  The idea isn’t bad nor is the interface on the surface.  Get even one level deeper and you may as well be at the bottom of a dark outhouse with a penlight.  And not one of those bright LED lights either, something that may run 3 candlepower with a full battery and lots of prayer.

Bottom line, Get a SanDisk product.  I have had 4 of their players and had no problems.  One day I will afford an Ipod, or get my Dad’s hand me down. Whatever.

That is All.

Justin