Posted by maxwell on 04/28/06 17:30

I bought a family member a portable MP3 player, but we're having a
terrible time getting music off of CDs and onto the player.

The player didn't come with any software, and said to use the Windows
Media Player to do the transfer. After numerous failed efforts, I
managed, but...I'm not sure I could do it twice!

I then proceeded to download half a dozen highly rated freeware
programs that purport to do this kind of thing, and had more or less
the same experience: either there were a dozen steps (and no error msgs
when a step failed--it just failed), or else the program said it
couldn't download to a portable MP3 player.

Conceptually, this shouldn't be so hard. I can't for the life of me
understand why I can't just have something like a two-pane Windows
explorer app, where I drag tracks from the CD over to the MP3 player,
and the system does everything needed (ripping, conversion to the
correct format, and downloading). Sure, I might have to set some
parameters the first time through (bit rate, whatever), but after that
it should be a drag-and-drop operation. Likewise, when I want to
delete tracks from the portable MP3 player, I should just click on a
track (or control- or shift-click) and press the delete button. And
when the MP3 player doesn't have room for a given track, an error msg
should pop up. Maybe I should be able to play a track from the CD so I
can decide whether to copy it, but that should be as simple as
double-clicking on it and launching it in Media Player.

Is there some such application? It doesn't need to look like a dorm
room stereo system out of the 60s; Windows Explorer would be just fine!

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