Thursday, May 29, 2008

Trials of Technology (Part 2)

Sansa e130Image via WikipediaAlong with those $4.99 Bluetooth headsets Jeffrey got Sunday, he also got a couple Sandisk Sansa c250 MP3 players . They'll be $30 after rebate, and I looked them up on buy.com, and they were almost $70 there. I have seen mixed reviews about this player. People either love it or they hate it, but I'm expecting to love it because I've been using a Sandisk Sansa e130 for a while and haven't had any problems with it.

Today I figured I better load some music and audiobooks onto the player and make sure it works, before I get the rebates ready and mailed. First, I browsed our library's Overdrive service, looking for books that sounded interesting, and then I downloaded 6 books -
  • Prodigal Son - Dean Koontzs' Frankenstein Series, Book 1 by Dean Koontz
  • The Dark Is Rising -The Dark is Rising Sequence, Book 2 by Susan Cooper
  • Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier
  • Back to the Bedroom by Janet Evanovich
  • Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman
  • Abundance -A Novel of Marie Antoinette by Sena Jeter Naslund
You wanted to know what I downloaded, right? Once downloaded, it was time to sync the files to my new Sansa c250. Error. Error. Error. Nothing would transfer. I read the quick start guide. I visited the Sandisk site. I started reading the forums. I spent way too much time messing with this thing.

The quick start guide said that I should be able to switch the mode of the player by going to Settings - USB. Guess what? No USB option under settings. I did find directions to switch the mode in the Sandisk forums - turn the player off, switch the hold on, hold down the rewind key, plug the player into the computer, when the computer sees the player let go of the rewind key. A little more complicated than just changing the mode under settings, huh? It did seem to work, and the computer saw the player and the microSD card as additional drives I could drag and drop to. Also, when I tried syncing with Windows Media Player and the Overdrive software from my library, the files synced to the player. Things were looking good.

Until I tried to play the books on the player. I kept getting an error message telling me to "synchronize to continue music subscription" and none of the files would play. Of course this was bugging me so I kept searching the forums and the Internet trying to figure out what to do - besides giving up and taking the stupid thing back. I finally read something on the forums that said to format the player and the microSD card and start all over. So, I did. Then I tried syncing two of my books, one with Windows Media Player and one with Overdrive, to see which one, if either would work.

I unplugged the player from the computer, browsed to one of the books, selected the first track, and it worked! That is, until I got to the third track, and then I got that same error message. Arrrrgh! So, I reformatted and tried again. This time I left the player in the default mode, the one that had caused errors when I first attempted to sync, and this time it worked, and when I unplugged the player and tried listening, all the tracks played.

It took way too much messing around, but I think it will work now. The only thing I'm a little worried about is this licensing/synchronization thing. Overdrive lets me check out and download audiobooks. After a week, the books check themselves back in, meaning I cannot listen to them on my computer anymore. However, once they are transferred to an MP3 player, they are supposed to play for as long as you need them, which is a good thing because it always takes me longer than a week to listen to a book. It will definitely take me longer than a week to listen to six books, so this new player better not lose that licensing before I'm done.