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Why Digital Rights Management Protected Music Players SuckWhy Digital Rights Management Protected Music Players Suck
My iRiver mp3 player made an enemy of me a couple of weeks ago. I needed to transfer a file from my laptop to a computer in an internet café, and I figured I could just hook the iRiver up and use it like a USB drive. I’ve done this before. Well no luck, eventhough the item I was moving was a text file… Most of the MP3 files I’ve had so far have just looked like an a thumb drive with an extra drive letter when I hook them up to the computer. The iriver doesn’t do that, it becomes its own device under My Computer. You can still drag and drop files to it, but it feels encumbered, there are funny problems about creating subdirectories, unless you drop already made subdirectories on it. It’s all somehow related to the digital rights management it incorporates.
Anyhow I hooked it up to my laptop, put some unsaved wiki text into a text file, saved the text file to the iriver, and then plugged the player into the desk top computer. It came up and saw the iriver, I could browse to the file, but the computer refused to let me copy the text file off the player! I was incensed at this! I am sure it is related to the rights management and the funky interface it has to my computer.
Fortunately, mp3 players are pretty ubiquitious here in Malaysia, a store down the street sold me a cute MP4 player with a 2 inch display that can actually play movies. I used it to transfer the text file without any hocus pocus. So beware the newest generation of mp3 players with DRM that Bill Gates, Jobs, Sony, and all the other entertainment-know-better-than-us people are going to be shoving down our throats. Wonder if good old fashioned non-DRM mp3 players will eventually be declared to be a dangerous munition that can’t be allowed into peoples purses or pockets….
In my desperation, I only bought a 1gb flash model, I discovered that the desperate stores down at Imbe would sell me one with 2 gigs for only a few bucks more. The iRiver eats a AAA battery a day, whereas this player happily recharges just by hooking it into my laptop….. At the moment I’m listening to the endless vowel vocalizations on an Enya album from some MP3 compilation disks I bought a couple of visits and leave here in a cabinet as my off continent backup storage.
At one store in Singapore, a salesgirl, trying to sell me the same MP3 player that I already bought, assured me that not only did the mp3 player display ebooks (ascii text files only) and play games (a single game, tetris), when I asked her if it could play play station games, she assured me it could. Great product knowledge…. NOT!
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