| My son is at the age where he is now into music. I had purchased a Rio S10 a couple of years ago and finally gave it to him. We decided that one of the benefits of doing well in school that we would allow him to download music. We also got a free download from Walmart to use so we figured, why not. Walmart only charges 88 cents per download vs iTunes at 99 cents. Well that 11 cents can add up. Anyway today he got to download 5 songs and his free one. Basically a little less than 5 dollars worth of music. So after downloading he then attempted to load the music onto the Rio. However it turned out that the music was created in WMA format with encription and wouldn't play on the Rio. So we tryed every which way we could to convert it to MP3, Because of the encription we were unable to convert. Basically he is stuck with having to listen to the music at the PC.
It doesn't end there though, we are not satisfied with that. So we tried iTunes at 99 cents (only one file this time) and low and behold iTunes is the same way. You can't convert it to MP3. Then I tried RealAudio and RealAudio uses rax format which again is encripted and can't be coverted to MP3. In reading up on these media players, they say that the players attempt to load the music onto the device so that it will work. Funny none of them worked. RealAudio even has a Device Install for the Rio S10. which I tried many times to no avail.
So now we are stuck with doing a long drawn out procedure of creating a regular CD of the music then ripping the CD to mp3's. However even that didn't work very well.
This is clearly unacceptable. I even went to mp3.com and even there couldn't get an mp3. Go figure.
So what is everyone doing for portable music players. If it means that he needs an iPod, then he is going to be out of luck. We have a perfectly good mp3 player which we can use.
I expect that what this means is that I will have to go underground to find MP3s and hope I don't get a virus or spyware but the music industry is forcing me to it. I want to complain to someone but who, not that RIAA because they are the ones pushing for this. And I have read that we are not the only ones with this problem. It's a shame because now we won't buy songs off the internet, but not only that, we rarely buy a CD. | |
