An alternative title for the post was going to be "How Bill Gates broke my MP3 player" but that would have been over the top. Anyway, our story begins with a well-functioning Sansa m240 MP3 player, working equally well as a music player with CDs loaded onto it via Windows Media Player (WMP) or with podcasts downloaded via right-click-save-target-as, sidestepping the need to deal with any additional software.
Until an attempted download of a podcast last night where the podcast in question wanted to start Windows Media Player before it would download, leading WMP to suggest an upgrade to version 11, which when installed then denied all knowledge of any content on the still-attached MP3 player, and refused to download any content to it. Furthermore, even the old save-target-as method was not working, because Windows couldn't communicate with the attached player either.
Anyway, after some cursing, it seems (from a novice perspective) that WMP v11 is now forcing the Sansa to default into "MTP mode" when it detects it, and not "MSC mode" which apparently was the previously normal mode of operation. It further seems that WMP v11 does this to facilitate one's purchases of digital music from Urge, the MTV site. And by the way, does anyone else see the irony in MTV being furious at its low foothold in the digital music business (to the extent that it is firing hundreds of people), when it helped create the digital music market in the first place by sucking so badly at playing, like, actual music, on the channel as opposed to the 15th rerun that day of Punk'd? Punk'd Indeed.
The bottom line now is that Bill Gates didn't break my MP3 player, but he has added several minutes to using it, since so far it has to be unplugged and reset to the friendly MSC mode before old style downloads of podcasts can resume. If this is how the WMP/Urge partnership is working for other people, the competitor music websites don't have much to worry about.
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