I bought a new mini-disc player recently. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking, WTF? In an age where everyone and their dog is hitting the street in a pair of white iPod headphones, why is Dan investing in archaic technology? Well, I did have a good reason. Y’see, a client sent me a mini-disc of sounds to put on their website, I had to find some way of getting it into the computer, and my last mini-disc player got stolen about five years ago. So I headed down to Richer Sounds to buy a new one.

What a joke! So archaic is the mini-disc player that they only had two left in the shop. And I faced a dilemma: do I buy the "Net MD", which hooks up to my computer via USB and, using a compressed format, can store about five albums worth of songs on a single mini-disc? Or do I buy the regular version, which can only play regular 80 minute discs, but has a microphone socket so I could potentially use it to record gigs & stuff (not that I seem to go to many gigs & stuff these days). Well, my MP3 player is broken, I really fancy the idea of walking the streets with hours of music in my pocket, and some time in the next year I’ll probably be able to afford an iRiver which can do all the recording I need. So I plumped for the USB version. Fool.

As it was the last one in the shop (the display model), they didn’t have all of the accessories for it. In fact, they didn’t have any. So I bought some headphones to go with it (and subsequently bought the right kind of USB cable), and assumed that I’d be able to download the software from the manufacturer’s website. First mistake (well, second mistake: the first one was buying the damn thing). Sharp (the manufacturer) wanted £15 for a copy of the BeatJam software which should, by rights, have been mine anyway. So I hunted around for alternatives. I found a piece of software called M3U2SBurner which is a bit cranky and complicated, but claims to be able to help me get my MP3s onto mini-disc. To get it to work, I had to download all sorts of other miscellaneous software, including something from Sony (how did I know Sony were going to be involved in this?) called Net MD Simple Burner. Unfortunately, it seems that Sony don’t want any old Tom, Dick or Harry getting their hands on this software, so I had a bit of a hunt to find a copy. But even then I couldn’t get it working - seemed I needed Windows drivers for my mini-disc player, and the Sony ones I’d managed to track down didn’t work on a Sharp machine.

I relented and sent Sharp the money for the software. It might cost me extra money, but at least it ought to make life easier. Well, yes, but not much. To start off with, the BeatJam software is complete pants, the kind of crap that usually gets bundled with Sony Vaios. I tried importing about 700 songs (which is all the songs I like to listen to on a Walkman, out of my collection of 18,000-odd). No dice: the computer just sat there for over two days, using up 100% of CPU cycles but not doing anything very obvious.

So I threw something less challenging at it: just an album-or-two’s worth of music. That worked much better, they all appeared in the BeatJam library. Next I had to convert them from MP3 to OpenMG format, and then "check them out" to my mini-disc player. For the first four songs, all went swimmingly, but then I got error messages telling me that "could not check the song out". No explanation why (and the Help files weren’t very enlightening). This happened regardless of which additional songs I tried to check out. If I wiped the disc clean and then started again, I could once more check out a small handful of songs (sometimes including songs which I’d been prevented from checking out before), but never more than about 25 minutes worth. In fact, on one attempt I only managed to get one song, of 2 minutes 29 seconds duration, on to a single disc before BeatJam started complaining that I couldn’t check out any more.

(Oh yes, a word about this "checking out". It seems that each OpenMG format song I have can only be copied to minidisc three times before it becomes useless. I gather this is some pathetic attempt to prevent piracy. It sucks. The punchline is that BeatJam is made by a company called Justsystem. This is the most unjust system of music protection I’ve seen in my life).

I tried again with M3U2SBurner, and had a little more success this time, but again I could barely get enough songs onto a single minidisc to last to my front door, let alone for an entire dog walk. And that was if I was lucky: most of the time Net MD Simple Burner simply wouldn’t recognise the mini-disc, or would crash out with some unspecified error.

I am convinced that at the root of all this strange and extremely irritating behaviour is some Sony-derived system to protect me from myself, some uber-complex system to prevent me from pirating the thousands of songs which I’ve spent weeks ripping from my CD collection (which now lives in the attic, and good riddance to it). I’ve seen this far too many times on far too many Sony systems (I know this mini-disc player is a Sharp, but the technology is obviously licensed from Sony). I hesitate to say this, but I’ve been the proud (yes, proud) owner of a great deal of Sony hardware in my time: I still have two VAIO laptops (BTW, did you know that VAIO stands for Video-Audio-Input-Output. My VAIOs don’t have line-in jacks. Why aren’t they called VAOs?), a Clié PDA, a digital stills camera, a digital video camera, and in the past I have had TVs, stereos, video recorders and mini-discs from Sony. No more. Enough. They are a great company, with many innovations, branding to die for, and a wonderful product line. But increasingly that innovation seems to be wasted on treating me, the customer, like an unruly kid who has to be protected from himself, pointless and hugely time-consuming hobbles the keep me within the Sony world, doing things the Sony way. In fact, they are like Apple at their worst, only far more insidious. Don’t buy Sony. I won’t be.