Bought myself an MP3 player at the weekend, a Thomson Lyra 256MB player with SD/MMC expansion. I thought it would be easy to get working, and I would be able to join a legal MP3/WMA download service and transfer tracks to my new player. So on Sunday evening I joined Napster, after a 9 meg download (which took forever on Dial up) I installed Napster only to find out it didnt support my device, then I discovered that it works with any device that works with Windows Media Player - no problems there my player does. I then tried to install the Napster plugin for Windows Media Player, that didnt work, so thought I best upgrade to WMP 10 another 11 meg download (and a long wait for the download to finish). Still couldnt get the WMP plugin to work.
Come Monday morning I was not a happy bunny, as I had spent money on this MP3 player in order to listen to my MP3 collection, (which I could as they happily transferred to the device) and purchase legal downloads, and transfer them to my device. I go into Napster in WMP and it says that it can't detect it. I thought to myself why can you not detect it when it is installed on my PC. So I click the button to get Napster expecting to have to sit through another 9meg download. Turned out that this download was a WMP plugin for Napster. So I installed it and Napster worked in WMP. Great I thought, lets buy a track to put on my MP3 player, so I bought the track, and couldnt transfer it to my device due to a licence problem. Worked out the best way to get a file to my device was to burn to an Audio CD, then rip it back to the PC and transfer. That worked great, but didnt solve the problem.
Tuesday came, and I went to Thomson's site for my player, hoping to find a place to report this problem, I did not find a place, but while looking through the support pages I saw a firmware update for my player, and was overjoyed as it added support to my player for DRM encoded WMA files, from legal download providers. So I installed the firmware, a lengthy process, that involved formatting my device, and finally my Napster download worked on the device. I'm now going to purchase more MP3 files that way.
I wish that legal MP3/WMA download companies did not DRM enccode their files as we the consumer should be able to play our downloads on any device we like, without have to sort out licensing problems!!
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