4th Aug
2005

OK, its time for a last rant before I head off.

One thing I can't live without is music. Whether it be a short bus-ride to Chester, or a two-week road trip around Northern France I make sure I have my trusty Sony MiniDisc player/recorder with me. It makes journeys more enjoyable, if only for the fact it drowns out the sounds of screaming kids. Oh, and it has the nifty NetMD functionality allowing me to transfer tunes quickly from my PC via a cradle and USB cable.

Now, I must first post a kind of disclaimer. The opinions that follow are based on my experience of Sony's OpenMG Jukebox version 1.5AE: the version that came bundled with my walkman. There may be newer versions I haven't tried, even though there are seemingly no official bug-fixes, patches or upgrades on the relevant sites.

OK, then. The main gist. OpenMG Jukebox (or OMG!! Juekbox!!11, as I like to call it after seeing the executable's filename) is a huge, steaming, vile dollop of horseshit. It doesn't work. It crashes. It crashes repeatedly. It rinses CPU time and hammers up to 90Mb of memory. It causes bits of Windows to fall over, such as Explorer and Task Manager. And it doesn't ever seem to be able to transfer albums successfully, let alone quickly.

Now, I keep a fairly clean system with few processes running: only the essentials usually. This means that normally I can get Windows back on its feet when an application misbehaves. But OMG!! Juekbox!!11 takes the whole barrel of biccies. It kills Task Manager, meaning I can't kill OMG!! Juekbox!!11. Even when I do get it to close, the process remains, still rinsing all my PC's resources. To illustrate this, I jotted down the main points of this rant on paper, instead of straight onto the site, because nothing will load or run whilst OMG!! Juekbox!!11 is busy pissing all over my system.

I've spent the last half an hour attempting to fill a couple of discs for my holidays. The result: at least ten crashes, three reboots and one and a half songs on a minidisc, the second of which won't play as its corrupted. Its enough to make a grown man cry. In fact...

/leafish_paul bursts into frustrated tears in corner

Ah, thats better.

I've always preferred my MD player over the modern norm: the MP3 Player. I've had three portable MD players/recorders in total, over about ten years, each resulting from the only extended warranty I've ever bought as the previous one karked it. But unless somewrites a truly Open MD player/transfer app (or at least a decent enough one I'd be willing to pay for), when this MD player goes, its a digital player all the way. And until then, its out with Sony OMG!! Juekbox!!11, and in with the CD player and trusty optical cable.