Walkman 'v' i-Player - A Case Report

Since McDawg's daily commute to work only takes ~ 10 minutes, unlike ~ 46.7% of fellow rail users, McDawg has not been that interested in succumbing to owning an i-pod, etc.

During 2001 - 2005 whilst flying and training it around the UK, for musical entertainment, having ditched ye olde Sony Walkman Cassette Player by then, one had moved onto a Portable CD Player and for the latter two years, had access to a Sony Vaio Laptop (albeit with an utterly shite battery life) thanks to my work in the voluntary sector.
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Two new gadgets I bought myself over the duration were my first ever digital camera and latterly, a portable mini-disc recorder/stereo mic. The former namely used when a fellow Trustee and I travelled across the pond for the first time in 2002 for a Conference and the latter for recording digital audio of various meetings.

I've since replaced the former with a much better model (with 2-Gig memory) in 2008. I thought I had left the latter in Wash. DC in 2004 but to my surprise, I found out a few weeks ago that it had been refound by my Dad in a travel case that I borrowed from him for that trip. I'll collect it shortly (he's currently on vacation, so arrangements in place for a pick-up from friends) as I intend to record some funky stuff next month in London.

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What I found most attractive about this gadget was that it apparently allowed rapid transfer of data from gadget to computing device (my case, a PC) via firewire. What was extremely irritating however was that due to DRM (Digital Rights Management) issues, there was no connectivity between devices. This was more than frustrating bearing in mind the fact that I was a) harvesting original (not Copyrighted) material and b) was doing so for a Registered UK Charity. In the end, I sussed out how to slow-transfer data via an analogue connection, but this defeated the purpose of purchasing such technology.

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As of late last year, one has on occassion borrowed (for long journeys) another mate at works' i-pod and since they have yet to learn how to add music to it, have done so for them, more than once and have a meaty/healthy i-tunes collection on my PC.

Two weeks ago, I purchased a 6 month old 8Gig Walkman for just £35 from a mate at work. They deleted their personal stuff (photos and rightly so) but left on their MP3 collection.

What was interesting to me was that the Walkman ONLY (emph on only) synchronises with Windows Media Player (WMP). Hell, I do use WMP for watching stuff, but my WMP Library only contains a small fraction of my files.

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I learned yesterday that i-tunes, apparently does not connect with other platforms such as Sony Walkman. I was going to ask about this via teh Interbewz, but did some digging, and after downloading a duff patch, found this one that did what I wanted it to do.

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Whilst in theory, the i-tunes and Walkman platforms are not compatible, they do talk to each other (anymore) if you know how.



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"There's Evian, then there's tap water"