MP3 Challenged

I think God doesn't want me to have an MP3 player. Well, I'm actually pretty sure God doesn't care. But he's sure not waving any magic dust that allows me to overcome MP3 obstacles.

It all began with Napster. Have I mentioned that I love Napster? Oh yeah! Here (ignore the menopause drivel), and here and here...it goes on and on.

So Napster? I'm happy with. The $50 MP3 player I bought when I joined? Not so much. I've actually burned through 2 of them now. After a month or so of enjoying them, they tend to freeze up or go blank. Napster has cheerfully replaced the first one and they say they are cheerfully replacing the second one, although it hasn't shown up since my conversation with the Napster person on January 9.

But it gets worse. I appear to have burned out my son Taylor's IAudio player, too. It's certainly not a big deal to him...it was not compatible with Napster and so we'd bought him a new player for Christmas.

I was planning my trip to Minnesota and thought I should carry along some tunes. For the plane, you know. Or those middle-of-the-night stints of wakefulness. It took the better part of a day to go through our CD collection, load the music onto the guy's computer and convert them to MP3 files, meticulously naming all the songs (for some reason the track names would not convert). I had this little 1 MB player completely full of great music. Everything from Trace Adkins to R. Carlos Nakai, Go Fish to Adie. I was excited.

I used it for the flight to Minnesota. Put it away. The battery was low. I plugged it into my friend Julie's computer to charge it back up and it froze.

On.

The screen was lit, a song was listed (K T Tunstall: "Another Place to Fall"), and it just stopped. No navigating, no nothing.

Just a few minutes ago, as I started to write this missive, I decided to try plugging it back into the guy's computer, now that I'm back home. The software for it is on there. Maybe it will just come back. I doubt it.

But usually I'm not the technologically challenged. I can't figure it out.