Microsoft technology that never works: a rant about MP3 players.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I bought the wife a Creative Zen Sleek MP3 player for Christmas. I brought it home.

I doesn’t work. Spectacularly so. I have just wrestled with the Creative forums, knowledge base, email support, phone support, and the Microsoft newsgroups and knowledge base for 3 days. Nothing works.

See, MS had to develop a proprietary technology to support multiple MP3 players on Windows XP (PlaysForSure), I suppose to compete with Apple’s iTunes. The only thing is, it’s crap. Everybody KNOWS it’s crap. It’s unstable, unreliable, and buggy as all hell. It’s point of greatest hype is its biggest weakness: it’s not supposed to need drivers. It’s simply supposed to recognize a device hooked to a PC via USB or Firewire.

Great! Sign me up! But it doesn’t, you see. Oh, it might for some (perhaps most) people, but not for me. Oh no. Not even after a three day saga of system troubleshooting and modification.

I lovingly unpacked the Sleek, charged it up, set the date and time, and proceeded to burn my wife’s favorite CD’s onto my computer. I wanted to give it to her ready to rock.

“Here, sweetie! Look, it has all the Smiths albums, all the They Might Be Giants albums, several Ani DiFranco, a few old country bits, and the complete Marvin Gaye. Also, it has a microphone on it, because I know how you come up with story ideas in the car, and never have anything around to record them on.”

I am so fucking sweet.

I plugged it in. The Found New Hardware wizard pops up, looking for drivers. No drivers to be had, it then relates that the device might not work properly.

Such an understatement.

I can’t get WMP to find the device. I can’t get the Zen software to find it. I can’t get Windows Explorer to find it. I can’t get Creative’s MediaSource to find it.

In short, over the past three days, I have:

  1. updated my BIOS,
  2. updated all my hardware drivers,
  3. checked the output amperage on my USB ports,
  4. reformatted the Sleek,
  5. performed disc cleanups on the Sleek,
  6. physically rest the damn thing a hundred times (it kept locking up and freezing,)
  7. hacked my registry,
  8. paid additional money to get a piece of software to analyze my registry,
  9. tested the cable on every USB port on my machine,
  10. disconnected all other USB devices,
  11. downloaded WMP 10 (twice. once from disc, and once from dowload,)
  12. updated WMP 10,
  13. restarted about ten bazillion times,
  14. performed hard reboots five bazillion times,
  15. contacted Creative tech support by email and phone,
  16. posted repeatedly on the forums,
  17. mined the Microsoft website,
  18. installed hotfixes,
  19. tried connecting the device with and without every possible combination of firewall and antivirus protection both on and off,
  20. FREAKING REINSTALLED AND REUPDATED WINDOWS,
  21. upgraded my RAM from a modest 512MB to a robust 2.5 GB, and
  22. driven 50 miles each way to the nearest big box outlet of Circuit City to exchange the player.

The new one doesn’t work either. There is NOTHING wrong with my system. It’s a Dell XPS Pentium4 machine with lots of power and storage. I keep it up very well. It’s fully protected and completely updated.

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK! Goddamn Microsoft’s fucking buggy kludge to hell! Goddamn Creative for using MS’s fucking buggy kludge as a basis for their players.

I’m returning this dumb son of a bitch and getting an iPod. I hope it works, or I might have to kill something.

2

Actually, the iPod does not have a microphone, one of the main reasons I decided to go with the Creative player. Goddamn it. I don’t know what the fuck I’m going to do.

3

Check the iAudio X5. I’ve been in similar situations as the one you’ve described, so I didn’t have high hopes when I plugged it into the USB drive of my PC. Damned if it didn’t do exactly what it was supposed to, just acting as another drive, no drivers required. Microphone works well too. No need to navigate menus or anything to use it, it has a specific button on the side.

4

You could always buy the iPod and then get one of the microphone add-ons.

5

Are you sure it’s Microsoft’s fault, and not a firmware issue with the player?

I have two different MP3 players that are ‘driverless’, and both work flawlessly with XP.

6

I’m sure the last thing you want is another suggestion, but can you mount it from a bootable Linux disc? I know it probably seems like overkill, but it’ll at least tell you whether it’s a Windows problem or a player problem.

7

Our first MP3 player was a Creative Reo, it never worked right the software would only see the player about half the time and the sound was crap. We ended up getting an iRiver that has been excellent and later bought a SanDisk player that is also great. The sanDisk is drag and drop with WinAmp.

8

Ditto. See here for specs. It’s very versatile and has support for a wider range of file formats.

It also doesn’t try to lock you into any proprietary copyright protection schemes which is a big bonus.

9

Oh, and Creative software sucks, always has sucked and probably always will. Their hardware is often good but I’ll always go out of my way to avoid using their add-on utils.

10

Since this thread is really more of a support discussion than a Creative/Microsoft flame fest, I’m gonna stick it in MPSIMS for now. We can always move it back if people start calling each other names.

11

Now that that’s out of the way, you may want to try using Notmad Explorer. I used it with my Nomad Zen when the Creative Software started acting crazy. It may not help, since it sounds like your problem is getting Windows to recognize the player at all, but they have a free trial version so it’s probably worth a shot.

12

Would this work?

13

My MP3 player is quite old, and the battery’s just about shot to hell, but this is the main reason I’m reluctant to upgrade. Its interface with my computer could not be simpler. I plug it into the USB, turn it on, and my computer detects it and opens an explorer window - it just treats it as another hard drive. All I have to do is copy and paste files in like I would if I were moving them around on my internal hard drives. Why on earth do manufacturers insist on making this process more complicated than that??

14

Ditto the Sandisk. Cheap and painless, does exactly what it says it will do, no driver installation. Only complaint is that the shuffle feature, like a shuffle features I’ve tried (including Winamp and WMP), is crap. And that’s only a small complaint. Plus it looks cool. :slight_smile:

15

I love you people. You solved more problems for me in 13 posts than Creative and MS did in 3 days, although I must admit that my PC runs like greased fucking lightning now that I’ve put so much time and money into upgrades and maintenance. So I guess it’s not a total loss.

Anyway, thanks for all the reviews and suggestions, and thanks especially for the links and suggestions to microphone add-ons for the iPod. I had no idea it had a line-in. That really is a dealmaker. Oddly, the mic is much more important to me than the music. My wife is a talented writer, and I want her to be able to record ideas anywhere.

Thanks also for the coding correction, fluiddruid.

Thank you. Precisely. I’ve been screaming this at my PC for two days. I don’t give a flying fuck about MS’s proprietary turd software. I don’t give a flying fuck about Creative’s proprietary turd software. I don’t give a shit if I ever use the syncing function in WMP. ALL the fuck I want to do is see the dumb sumbitch in Windows Explorer. All the goddamn thing is is a hard drive anyway. Treat it like one, for chrissakes.

Anyway, I’m off through the rain and gloom to trade this damn thing for something that I hope will work. Further ranting as events warrant.

16

It may be too late, but I had similar problems with my creative MuVo player… Windows detected it fine, but I couldn’t load anything onto it. Not even with the proprietry piece of crap “music station” that came with it.

The solution? I formatted the removable drive. No shit. Each time I tried to access it, windows asked if I wanted to format it. I was wary at first, but after I while I just got sick of not being able to use it, so I followed the windows prompt and formatted. And now it works like a dream, on any XP machine.

17

A couple more quick specifics:

Reasonably sure, yes. I have completely reformatted the device disc, and double-checked the firmware version. It’s the latest available.

I don’t have a bootable Linux disc…and I’m a raging n00b. I would have no idea how to do so. I appreciate the attempt though.

Just gave it a shot. The program couldn’t recognize the device, since Windows won’t acknowledge it. Thanks, though.

18

Okay, ignore me then :slight_smile: I read the list, and read it twice, but still managed to miss the fact that you’d reformatted the device.

19

That’s why I’m shocked at how well iPod does/did. I mean, the sound quality is far from great, the proprietary copyright protection thing, the fact that you can get better quality mp3 players, with more features, at a lower price, etc, etc.

Is there anything beyond the brand name people buy iPod for?

20

Welp, I have new info. I took the thing back to Circuit City, where I described the problem to a store tech. He connected the Sleek to his computer. It worked perfectly.

After I got finished cursing, I agreed to take it back home for one more try. He gave me some suggestions. Uninstall Norton Internet Security. Use their symNRT program to do it, since apparently, the regular ol’ add/remove programs options doesn’t clean everything out well enough. Check BIOS settings.

I did all that. It STILL DOES NOT WORK.

I just contacted Dell support, because, by God, what else am I going to do? Utterly unhelpful. The guy could not wrap his head around “driverless.”

Motherfucker, I’m frustrated, but I must eat crow to some extent. It apparently is not a failure on MS’s part. Something is wonky with my system…but I’ve been neck deep in its guts, and I’m godDAMNED if I know what it is.