Media Monkey Saves the Day!

So, I get this MP3 player for Christmas. Only, it doesn't play mp3s. That's right, I got an MP3 player that doesn't play MP3s.

Bless my wife. We had looked at MP3 players at Wal Mart several months ago and I expressed an interest in the RCA Lyra. I liked it because it had internal memory and an SD card slot. For the technically challenged, that means you can make it so you can store more songs on it by adding one of those little memory cards you use for a digital camera.

She saved a few bucks and went to Overstock.com and bought me a factory refurbished Lyra 1070. I excitedly unpacked it, connected it to my laptop, and copied an MP3 file to it... nothing. Nada. Zip. Zero. File not recognized.

So, I bit the bullet and decided to RTFM (Read The "Furnished" Manual) and discovered that you have to use MusicMatch Jukebox (blech!) with a special plugin to transfer the files to the unit in a proprietary MPY format. So, that's what I did. Of course, from my earlier editorial comment, you can probably tell MMJB is not my favorite music management/playback software and the Lyra actually came with an older version (7.1 - the current version is 10).

Then, I started having problems with the USB connection. The first time I plugged it in after starting the computer, it would work fine. If I unplugged it and plugged it back in without restarting the computer, though, Windows would tell me, "The USB device is not working properly..."

I began to resent the thing and was ready to ask my wife to send it back. I'm a geek and I was having an inordinate amount of trouble with it. Then, one time when I plugged in the USB cable, Windows thought I had plugged in a second scanner. Huh??? Well, that clued me in. For some reason, Mr. Scanner and Mr. Lyra weren't playing well together. I unplugged the USB cable from the scanner and haven't had any more trouble with it.

Then, after a little bit of internet research, I discovered that the Lyra will play WMA (windows Media Audio) files without conversion. Cool, now I have a way to use drag-and-drop... but how do I get my MP3s into WMA format? I don't really want to re-rip my CDs.

Enter MediaMonkey. MediaMonkey, as opposed to Media Monkey (GAAH!!), is a free media organizer that I started playing with about a month ago. It allows me to batch edit the ID3 tag (information about the file stored in the file that some MP3 players and software can read), batch rename (I'm really picky about my file naming conventions), rate tracks, and classify them about 18 ways to Sunday. Oh, yeah, one other thing it can do is convert from MP3 to other file formats... like WMA.

I've spent the past two days converting my library. I did some testing and found that, on the player, a 128K bitrate WMA file doesn't sound much different than a file at a bitrate of 96K. Again, to the technically challenged, a file encoded at a bitrate of 96K is slightly smaller than a file encoded at 128K... which means I can put more songs into the player's limited memory without sacrificing much audible sound quality. (the purists can be quiet here, thankyouverymuch)

So, I can now use MediaMonkey to manage and convert my files instead of using MusicMatch Jukebox. I'm happy.