Less is more
Just bought my daughter a cheap MP3 player. Small, lightweight, silver and cheaper than an iPod. We connected it to the PC using the USB cable. The MP3 device simply appears as an additional disk drive so I quickly show my daughter how to copy one song from 'My Music' onto the player and she does the rest. Within 5 minutes, she is happy and listening to music on her new toy !
This prompted me to finally get around to something I wanted to do for a while - to copy some new music onto my aging Sony MiniDisc Walkman. This is slightly larger and heavier than the MP3 player but still looks (and sounds) pretty good.
Anyway, it's been a while since I transferred any music. So long in fact, that my hard disk on the PC died and has been replaced. Consequently the Sony OpenMG program needed to transfer music onto the Walkman is not installed any more and I can't easily locate the original CD. So I go to the Sony web site to download the software. Sony's website is actually a confusing mess of sites distributed worldwide. Sony make some great technology products but their Web sites are a truly bizarre mixture of styles and content. One even insisted I download IE 5.5 (I was using Firefox).
Eventually I discover the OpenMG software has been upgraded, revamped and is now called SonicStage. I download and and install the program, conquer the non-intuitive user interface and am finally poised to press the button to finally transfer two CD's in WMA format to the Sony device.
However SonicStage won't let me because of copyright protection so I have to rip the CD's again using SonicStage and finally tranfer the music to the MD Walkman.
That's fine for two CD's but I am hardly going to re-record my other 124 CD's into Sony's ATRAC format.
Sometimes, less is more.