Follow up on iPods / MP3 players

I had a talk with Jeff today about MP3 players, and he clarified some things. Basically, they probably won't work at all on our computers.

First off, when you plug the thing into the computer, it needs to have a driver installed for the computer to recognize it. Like any other outide software, drivers cannot be installed and run on our computers.

Even if a particular MP3 player did get recognized by our computers because the required driver was already part of Windows, there would be the problem of getting the songs on the MP3 player. There is very little music available for free download -- most of the free music is "streaming," which means you can listen to it instantaneously, but you can't capture it as a file and save the file. Various websites sell MP3 downloads, either by the song or by monthly subscription, but many of them require you to download, install, and run software to use their service. Again, we can't install and run outside software.

Jeff said he supposed we could add the necessary software to our computers, but there are so many different players requiring so many different devices, and so many different subscription services requiring so many different programs, that he wouldn't know which ones to install. If we pick the most popular five, the guy who uses the sixth will be left out. And, of course, we would have to learn to use, troubleshoot, and help patrons with all this stuff. We can track the requests we get from people, and Jeff can do it if there really is a lot of demand, but I suspect that people are finding other places to do this and they don't need to do it at the library.

So the short answer is, because of the drivers and music management software required to make MP3 players work, they probably won't work on our computers. As always, people are welcome to bring their device in and try it, but we can't guarantee it will work.