Its a Sony...

The latest Reason For Not Going To The Gym that I've been able to come up with is that I don't have any music to listen to. I have an MP3 player, and, if I was organised enough, I could quite easily fill it up with enough music to occupy my intended gym time (and remember to charge the batteries), but I'm never that organised. The solution to this problem, I decided, was to buy an MP3 player with a built in FM tuner, so I would still be able to listen to the radio even if I didn't have any other music.

So on Sunday, I went to JB HiFi to make said purchase. I wanted a 1GB MP3 player with an FM tuner. Simple. So I got a 2GB Soniq player for $97 plus an extended three year warranty for an extra $30. I got it home and discovered that it didn't have integrated USB. Which means that I need a cable to transfer music from my computer to the player. Inconvenient, though not a huge problem, if I'm at home. A downright nuisance if I'm at someone else's house and want to, er, borrow some of their music.

So I took the Soniq player back today and swapped it for a shiny new Sony player. It's got 1GB of memory, integrated USB, an FM tuner and it charges from the USB port of my computer, for a mere $30 more than the original Soniq player plus the warranty. I took it home and unwrapped it, read the instructions and installed the software on my computer (whilst vaguely wondering what the software was actually for). The instructions quite clearly state that you must use the included software to transfer files onto the player, but, as a technical person, I figured I wasn't the intended audience for said instructions. Shunning the nasty interface of the Sony software, I attempted to upload my music the old fashioned way. Boy was I in for a horrible surprise.

There is a point to the nasty software. It converts my lovely MP3s into a horrible Sony proprietry format known as ATRAC. My fantastic new MP3 player can't play MP3s!

I'm just not sure how I feel about this. Fanatical audio buffs aside, there isn't too much difference between the two formats, quality-wise. I mean, there's always people out there who refuse to listen to MP3s because of their supposed inferior sound quality, but I personally can't hear it. And I can still store MP3s on my player, I just can't play them. But it's damn inconvenient - after all, I wanted an MP3 player. And the program that I have to use to transfer songs onto the player is a massive pain. It's probably alright to use if you're the kind of person who carefully categorises all their music by artist and album and puts nice tags full of random, useless information on all their files, but seriously, can you see me doing that?

So can I take this one back too?