Dear Fischer Price: Please stick to Little People.
We all have good memories of Fischer Price. My parents managed to stow away our Fischer Price Little People toys (the good ones made out of wood before people started freaking out about kids choking on them) and now our children love to play with them while at Grandma’s house.
My older son, now 5, likes music and Grandma decided to get him the Fischer Price FP3 player for his birthday last year. It’s not a bad device. It’s rugged. Easy controls. And the volume can’t be turned up to a point where it’d damage any ears.
6 months later he tells me he’s tired of the nursery rhymes on it and wants me to put some better music on it for him–specifically Jimmy Dean’s ‘Big Bad John’ and the theme to Batman. No problem! Let’s go hook it up to the computer and toss some songs on there.
Hmm…wait a minute. These are FP3 files. WTF is an FP3 file? Off to FP’s web site. Oh! It’s another #*$&#^ proprietary DRMed music format. Ugh.
OK, well, it says I can buy FP3 files online from their site (yea, right.), or I can convert any CD into an FP3 file myself. Well, maybe I can convert MP3 files too. Let’s give it a shot.
Hmm…why can’t I download the conversion sofware anywhere? Oh…I can only install it from the CD that came with the player!? You mean the CD that we got 6 months ago? You expect me to know where that is? Ugh.
Long story short, if you get the FP3 player, DON’T LOOSE THE CD unless you’re fine spending $5 and waiting 2 weeks to intall to make your 5 year old happy.
3 Comments
What mofo’s, I mean really, how DARE they expect you to have a minimum amount of self discipline.
You may not like DRMs, but you know, life IS a lot easier when everything is someone else’s fault.
“What mofo’s, I mean really, how DARE they expect you to have a minimum amount of self discipline.”
I suppose you have some briliantly anal system of putting every one of your kids’ toys’ parts into a file cabinet and only let them play with items provided they fill out a requisition form in triplicate.
I suppose that WOULD be a lot easier than expecting a company to copy the files on the CD to the web site so people could just download them without having to bother customer support.
I just want to say thanks for sharing that info.. I am getting one of these for my 4 year old for Christmas, and wanted to understand what the heck the fp3 files were all about. I have a good mp3 conversion program on my computer, but it certainly does not convert to fp3!! I hope the $5 for the replacement CD was worth the trouble and your son is enjoying his music player still!!
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[...] As a follow up to my previous rant about the Fischer Price FP3 player, here’s an overall summary review of the product. I’m posting this here in hopes Google can pick it up and warn any unsuspecting geek parents. [...]