I got my youngest, Anxiety, an .mp3 player for Yule. Of course the stores were all sold out of iPods, so I went ahead and got a Sony Walkman Bean, which is supposed to have 512MB of storage, and according to the label, that means it can hold 345 songs (and in small print, it says “calculated based on 4 minutes per song in ATRAC3plus @ 48 kbps”).

First of all, we filled up her storage with 126 songs, so obviously there’s a file size discrepancy here. I’m sure it’s some sort of technical thing about the .mp3 files on our computer being a lot larger than the calculation they used. Second, the Sony interface - SonicStage - on the computer, that you have to use to put files on the player, is crap. It’s not user-friendly, it only sorts by album names (hello, we don’t have album names on a lot of these .mp3 files!), and it’s excrutiatingly slow. I can probably load at least 5 times as many files onto my iPod mini with the iTunes program in the same time it takes to load this Sony Bean with the SonicStage program…and the iTunes program automatically skips duplicate files which are already on your iPod if you tell it to load your entire library of songs. The Sony program & player doesn’t, so make damned sure you aren’t filling up the limited space with duplicate songs you already loaded.

And to put the icing on the cake, if you try to go to the Sony website, but you aren’t using Internet Exploder, you get a webpage that says, “We appreciate your interest in the Connect music store, but our store currently only works with Internet Explorer 5.5 and above. You don’t seem to be using that particular browser at the moment, so, unfortunately, we’ll have to part ways until we support the browser you’re currently using or you upgrade to the latest version of Internet Explorer.” Isn’t that just fuq’ing lovely?! (Is Sony owned by Microsoft?)

I think this particular product is only useful if you don’t mind taking the ridiculous amount of time to load it completely with a batch of songs that you will never, ever change. It’s taken me 3 hours to do this much. This was less fun and more time-consuming than when Anxiety was 2 and I had to put together the 213 pink-and-white plastic parts for the 3-story, nearly 5-foot tall Barbie Dream Townhouse with working elevator that her grandmother gave her.

If I buy another .mp3 player again in the future, it might not necessarily be another iPod, but it sure as hell won’t be another Sony.