PLAYSFORSURE SUCKS... AND A LITTLE ON THE ARCHOS 504

As you all know we here at technobabble just got an Archos 504 to review and hopefully enjoy. The Archos 504 is a PlaysForSure compatible device which means that it is compatible with Microsoft's Windows Media files using digital rights management (DRM for short).

That said, when we unpacked the 504 we were excited to see how these Microsoft services worked and how easy there were to use.

The first hurdle is finding a music store. Now you guys in the United States have it great. You have all these services available at your fingertips (eg. Napster, Yahoo, Amazon etc.). We don't have them here (sure you can download the application but they don't work - plus the Yahoo player sucks). Well it turns out there are two actual services you can get here. One from Telus and the other from Sympatico.

Well, neither of these work with Firefox and the Telus music website doesn't work on the new Internet Explorer 7.

So that leaves you with Sympatico. I cannot stand Sympatico one bit and the website is just awful to navigate. Also, it's just a carbon copy of Napter's website. Microsoft, why can't you bring the cool services here instead of pawning off you services to companies that don't understand anything about music?

What does this leave me? Absolutely nothing except iTunes. Yes, I know that you can't play FairPlay DRM music on the Archos 504 but there is a way around it and I find it much more simple. You can burn the music and import them into iTunes as MP3's. No, you can't sync the 504 using iTunes so you have to enable disk mode on the 504 to copy your music over.

Yes, American's can complain all they want but we don't have anything here in Canada. Basically, you have to pirate music and video if you want to get it legally here in Canada.

Other than that the Archos is a great media player, if you can get the music and movies on it. One complaint. Don't believe everything you read on the box. The box for the 504 says:

"Video player: plays MPEG-4 (1), WMV (2), & protected WMV (2) files."
"Play H264 (3), MPEG-2 (4) & VOB (4) files with optional plug-ins."

Yes the player plays all those formats BUT you have to PAY for them. What a load of CRAP! I had to pay an extra $40 (US) to get the darn plug-ins. That is utterly stupid. If you are selling a media player for $399 (CAN) and want to make even more money off the people that buy the player by making them buy the darn Plug-ins to play the most popular formats, that company is going to die and I am just about ready to take it back because of this.

Hold on to your iPods people. They may have small screens but its a lot easier.

UPDATE: OK. Just thought of one more music service that will work. You can use eMusic. However, not all music on on there and there is now video. It is all in MP3 format thus there is no DRM.