Wahoo,
A day of joy today should be.
Yesterday I got my hands on an mp3 player for £25.
It's the Nokia HDR-1 with a built in radio (hard to find it on their site I know).
It takes Multimedia Memory Cards and I can buy a 128Mb one for £50 so I was quite happy. That's a pretty good price and I can get quite a bit of music onto it for reasonably cheap.
I got the player and it looked good and a test sounded quite good although the controls were a little confusing and awkward at times. The lack of any instruction manual to explain how to use it was also worrying as it is not straight forwards or easy to use.
A quick search online however managed to drag up a .pdf manual which quickly sorted that.
Then the fun began, I wanted to put some of my own music onto it. I installed the software and prayed I would see a drive appear in explorer so I could use MJ to add or remove music, no luck. I was a bit fried but oh well, I can live so I fired up their software: Nokia Audio Manager!
Wahoo - lovely. I then tried to work out how to put some songs on the player only to find I couldn't do this directly. I first needed to create a db of all my music and then could add songs from this db. I searched the tools for an option to allow me to specify where to search for music but was disappointed to only find: 'Search Whole Computer' or 'Add Files'. I decided to just let it search the whole computer even though this would be a LONG task and add all kinds of audio files that weren't music.
It started and was taking AGES so I checked some of the music directories to see what was taking so long and noticed that in every single directory where there was music there were now copies of EACH song with a .lse extension that were all the same size as the original files just slightly bigger to allow space for the DRM built into it.
Wahoo - It wanted to duplicate my WHOLE 40Gb music collection and turn it into an 80Gb music collection of duplicates - half in mp3 and half in DRM formatted LSE files. I cancelled this, did search for *.lse and deleted them all.
How do I then get music onto my player. I finally decided to use MJ to get all the songs I want, put them in one directory and then use the 'Add Files' option to add the indivudual files. I did this and tried to copy them accross to the player after it had made the duplicate files with the .lse extension. It got a WHOLE
4 songs on. There was NO option to change the bitrate of the songs before copying them so more would fit.
Basically this software wants to copy ALL your music and make duplicates of it in the original bitrate that you keep your music on your computer at (a nice high quality as you have plenty of space) and then wants you to choose music from this big new library it has created and copy it at this original high bitrate to your player.
If you want to get more music onto the player by lowering the bitrate you then have to lower these manually to a lower bitrate, then add them to your library and have it create duplicates in .lse format. You can then copy these over to your player.
Easy process huh?? Simple and intuitive and oh so use friendly!!!
I HATE THIS SOFTWARE!!So far the only way I now manage to do it is to use MJ, find the files I want and convert them and to have MJ copy these lower bitrate files to a specific folder as it converts them. I then import these into my Nokia Audio Manager software and let it make duplicates of these files at the lower bitrate then copy them accross.
I then have a .bat file which I run which deletes the whole database as well as all the new files I've had to create in duplicate (firstly the lower bitrate mp3 files, then the copies in .lse format.).
The reason I have to delete the db is that it only lets you delete songs from it 1 by 1 so is a LONG winded process to remove the songs that I just added to my player.
The good news is that with the presets I've got I can manage to squeeze 13 songs onto my 32 Meg card and they sound pretty good.
I dont know if I'm actually going to get much use out of this player though, I seriously regret buying it purely because of the software for it. Getting songs onto the player is just tooo painful and long winded a process.
The good side is it's a cute looking player and if I got a 128 Meg card I could squeeze around 50 songs onto it which is not bad.
You can see the player here:
http://www.nokia.com/nokia/0,4879,4226,00.htmlIf you want to try the software for yourself to truely see just how bad software can get you can find a copy of it here:
http://nds1.nokia.com/phones/files/software/5510_NokiaAudioManager.exeIf anyone is bored and a good programmer and thinks they could make some kind of plugin for this for MJ I would LOVE them forever as would all users of this player.To be honest, you could probably strike up a deal with Nokia as they are aware the software sucks (according to the tech support guy I spoke to who agreed with me fully and said they'd just bought the software from some 3rd party and had it tweaked to work for their mp3 player).
Anyway - Had to vent, It's hard to express how bad this software is, it totally ruined what might otherwise be a cute cheap mp3 player.
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Topic: OT: And the worst software of the year goes to... (Read 1453 times)