Fischer Price FP3 Player = Headaches for dad.
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.
First, to be fair, the pros: It’s a nice piece of industrial design. It’s rugged, which is a big plus. It also has very large buttons that even our 2 year old has figured out (when he can steel it form his older brother). The nicest feature, IMHO, is that the volume is limited, so the young’uns can’t blow out their ear drums quite yet. In terms of the device, FP did good.
Now, the con. Can you guess what it is? (This is me afterall…that should give you a clue): DRM. Really nasty DRM.
For starters, the software comes on a CD with the player. This is the *only* way to get the software. You can not download it anywhere. If you loose it, you pay $5 to have FP ship you a new one. Secondly, Windows only. Third…both the software AND the FP3 player can only be registered to ONE machine. That means if your brother was gracious and installed it on his machine at xmas to transfer some songs to the player that your son has since then fallen in love with, you now have to explain to him why you have to delete them completely so you can connect the player to your home machine.
Finally, this biggest headache: you only have two options for getting music onto the device: Buy from Fischer Price online in FP3 format or re-rip the songs from CD into FP3 format via the software.
That means none of the song you’ve already ripped to MP3 or have purchased online via iTunes or the like can be easily put onto the player.
So, long story short, here’s the process I had to go through after I casually promised my son a few weeks ago that we could put a few new songs on his player for him:
- First spend an hour looking for the disk only to not find it.
- The next day, pull out the credit card and call customer support
- Wait a week for the mail to come
- install the software
- reformat the FP3 player
- Take the songs you want to add and make a new playlist in iTunes
- Burn a CD
- open the FP3 software
- Rip the CD
- re-enter all the song titles and artis information
- copy files to the FP3 player
- repeat steps 6-11 if you want to fill up the other half of the 128mb space on the FP3 player
- Enjoy the new drink coasters.
Bottom line advice for anyone stumbling upon this thread researching this as a gift for their child: skip the toy store and walk over the the Apple Store and grab the iPod shuffle. It’s only about $10 more but will save you more than half the headaches.
34 Comments
That does sound like a headache. The Fisher Price Kidtronics digital camera, however was remarkably easy to use and transfer files, even on a MAC. I was astonished. My 3 year old loves to take photos and add them to flickr, just like me.
You could always just burn to a disk image and then mount the iso using a program like daemon tools and then rip the music from the virtual disk using the Fisher Price software. You’d at least get rid of some of the time since it’ll read and write to the hard disk faster than reading and writing to a cd. Also it would save you from the coasters. I was looking at one of these and thought that it wouldn’t be too bad of a process this way.
I wholeheartedly support this comment.
I love the FP3 because you can plug it into the speakers and the kid can listen and control the music without having to wear earphones. But the software is a complete and utter nightmare, for all the reasons described. It is really a big pity - I seriously doubt that there are many geeks out there with the time and energy to download their kids favourite tunes with an appropriate picture and label. If you actually have a kid - forget it!!
Kormath, although you wrote about this in February, I am wholeheartedly hoping that you still check this thread ever so often. My CD drive does not work on my laptop and I was wondering what software would be best to do the disk imaging?
The FP3 player is a nightmare. During our recent move we lost the disk and can do nothing with the FP3 player until we get a new software disk. They could have made it a little easier to transfer and remove songs!
I LOVE this FP3 player. My daughter got it for her 7th Birthday and I was concerned it might be alittle young for her, but she LOVES it. She has developmental issues so I knew I didn’t want to get her an adults, or even older childs cd or mp3 player because of the potential for breakage being so high. The software is easy to use, but it takes time to upload songs from cd’s and then match them to pictures, it took me a couple of hours. It’s no more time consuming than organizing itunes for those who have iPods. My daughter is 8 now and still LOVES it. I like that you can add whatever songs your child likes at the time, and it’s TOTALLY break-proof.
LOVE IT!!
Oh I totally agree, got the FP3 player last year and this year just got my 5 year old the ipod nano. She is still usuing the FP3 but it is a pain and it eats batteries like crazy. Wish I would have seen this thread before.
I bought this for my daughter last year at Christmas because I could not find the FP Kids Camera. She ended up getting the camera at the last minute and we held onto this for her birthday in September. We did not set up the software right away because she was content with the songs/stories it included. However, after wanting to add new songs recently, I came across the software issue. I read this post and thought “great, I should have set it up right away!” since I had no idea where the CD was. Luckily I found it, and it is complete. I know you say that it can only be installed onto one computer, but when I set it up it had a disclaimer stating that the software could be installed on up to 5 machines. Maybe I have a newer version of the software - I hope!! I just wanted to say thanks for all of the helpful info you posted {especially about transfering files from iTunes!}
For Vista users this device is technically not compatible…however there is a workaround. Use the Fisher-Price software simply for converting to fp3 format (there a numerous ways to accomplish this…ripping CD, mounting an image with lots of MP3s converted, etc). After converting some of your audio, the converted FP3 files are stored in “c:\users\yourusername\music\fisher-price\fp3 player”). Note the filenames will all be generic now called something like Track00002.fp3. Again you will simply use the software for converting, however you cannot use this software for file transfer since the software doesn’t seem to recognize the device on a Vista machine. However, when you plug the device into the Vista machine it pops up as a “removable drive” (drive L: on my machine). Interestingly you can simply move the FP3 files that you converted over to the device. After moving, all you’ll need to do is adjust the playlist manually in wordpad so the device will see the files. The playlist is contained on the device in a file called “playlist.sng”. Simply edit the file to include as many files as you copy to the device. The format is always:
8
A:\Track00000.fp3
A:\Track00001.fp3
A:\Track00002.fp3
A:\Track00003.fp3
Make sure the files you copy over are referenced within this file. Then also ensure that the number at the top of this file matches the number of songs you want available. If you have 6 songs, make sure it says “6″ at the top of this file. If you have 6 songs but only put the number “4″ at the top, the device will only find the first 4 songs in your playlist. After tooling with this thing for about an hour I figure this out and it’s pretty simply now in hindsight. Good luck.
One other thing…you’ll notice on the device that there are two playlists. One called “playlist.sng” and one called “playlist.sty”. The one with the “sng” extension is for the songs playlists. The other with the extension of “sty” is for the stories playlists on the device. You can essentially download music and stories from their website and you’ll see in the first menu on the device that you have the ability to select either one. When manually pushing files over, you need to edit the appropriate one (usually the music playlist).
Hi Brandon,
You are a genius. I had it already packed up for return when I came across your posting. Its a pity Fisher Price couldnt be as helpful.
Bradon- Thank You! I have been working on this for quite some time! Just trying to play a little music for my girl you know? One problem though, Vista only sees one file in the “Removeable Drive” it mounts as: “Version.INF”. I got the songs ripped to FP3s and copied over to teh device, but can’t find the playlist or anything else on my device for that matter (it still plays the songs that came on it however), but they are not showing up on Vista?
Any thoughts?
Wow Bradon, thanks for your comments. I too have Vista. This really works! I too was on the brink of taking this back. I am embarrassed to say how long I have been working on this. Count from Dec. 25th. Excellent feedback.
Jason, I’m not sure why you’re not seeing the playlist. My computer actually sees both playlists that Bradon mentioned. Did you create a playlist when you were in the Fischer Price Program? Maybe try this; however, you should be able to see the other two lists prior to this since they should be all ready loaded on your FP3 player. Thanks.
This is so great! Jason - I believe the issue you have is that you need to “Show Hidden Files”. I was having the same issue and that worked for me. I could actually see that there were 66 files in my FP3_FILES folder, but then when I opened it, there was nothing there. Try that and see if it works for you.
I have been having a lot of the same problems here, but I wanted to add that I bought 2 players for Christmas (Pink-for my 2yo d, and Blue for my 3yo s.) I loaded the software on my laptop at work and had no trouble getting the songs copied and transfered to my son’s player. However, everytime I tried to hook up my daughter’s player, I got a bunch of “access denied” errors. I finally called customer service this morning and they told me that I couldn’t use the software on a network computer, that I had to use a different one. I drug out my old dinosaur of a desktop and spent all afternoon trying to get it to work–guess what–according to customer service, it’s missing a driver, so it won’t work. In frustration and despair, I took everything to my mother’s house to try her computer, 3rd times the charm, right? NO! After calling customer service again–they said that it would not work with VISTA! UGH! I’m going to print out the info posted here, but if that doesn’t work I think I’ll throw these things out the nearest window. (Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that when my son opened his on Christmas, the songs had to be transfer to the machine again, because it was making some horrible skipping noise…) Hopefully I can get this mess under control soon–when my son’s player was working, he loved it. They both had no problem using it and I loved the headphones.
hi I accidentally deleted playlist.sng how can i get it back
Any advise for Vista users? I can’t get the darn program cause I have vista, and now I can’t even get music on my daughters FP3….I am peeved!
I wish I would have seen this before I bought one. I canot even get the thing to activate on my vista machine. Once again Good Design. Poor Software Development.
I’m hoping someone can help me with my problem. When trying to convert files to FP3 format using the software, the songs then show in the playlist on the computer, then I try to transfer the songs to the device, I get an error and am told to make sure the device is connected properly and is powered on. Well, I know enough to make sure the device is connected, it shows up under My Computer and when transferring, the FP3 player shows transferring for about 2 seconds before the error pops up. My 4 year old would love to have her Kids Bop songs on her FP3 player and I would love to have her wear headphones when listening to them :P. Just transferring them is a nightmare, I have tried this on 3 different computers, all w/ Windows XP, and have the same issue on all 3 computers.
DeAnna, I’m having the same issue on an XP machine.
I followed the instructions from Bradon and it works great now. Too bad the FP software is so bad. Now to figure out how to also get the icons to come across.
DeAnna, I had the same problem as you. I followed Bradon’s advice and it started to work.
This post, I think, has been the most popular one I’ve ever written…at least in terms of comments!
I’m glad it helped a few of you, though I’m saddened that others are still being victimized by the horrid FP3 format that they invented.
FYI, the kids got new MP3 players for xmas from the grandparents. They were really cheap GPX things that I’m sure were less than $20. I was skeptical, but once I discovered they mounted as plain USB thumb drives, and all I had to do was drag MP3 files over to it, I was elated.
Prior to the kids getting these, we were going to get them the Sansa Shakers, which appear to be the ideal kid MP3 players:
http://www.sandisk.com/Products/Catalog(1253)-SanDisk_Sansa_ShakerMP3_Players.aspx
Your post was very helpful. When I found my sons new player on K-Mart clearance rack for 14.99, I was thrilled. That is until I came home and tried to make it work on my Vista computer. I followed your instructions, and now it’s working great. no wonder these things were on sale so cheap!
I finally got my own icons to work in the player. Used very simple black and white images (like ones from coloring books). Sized them to 80W X 68H at a resolution of 80 px. Converted them to grayscale and then to bitmap at a 50% threshold for a high contrast image. I saved them, in BMP format, to the Icon Library folder inside the install folder and in a folder I found in My Documents - My Pictures - Fisher-Price - FP3 Player - My Icon Library, (each icon was saved, then, twice with the same name). When I opened the application the image icons were available.
Help from Vista owner’s, I purchased new computer and to my dismay found out it is not compatible with the fp3 player (it’s not the only thing, thinking of going back to xp!) I had tried copying through ubs and was about to give up when i found this site. However, i have followed bradon’s instruction to a t and still not working. This is what I have done: make a playlist on fisher price fp2 player, copy it over to device drive, in the device drive open the playlist with notepad and edit as per brandon’s message. the one thing i did note is there was no “.sng or .sty” after the playlist. (maybe because all songs??) the notepad part start with number of songs on line 1 and then line 2 A:/Track00001.fp3 and so on, then I resaved. What did I miss?
I was having the same problem as DeAnna and I finall figured it out. You need to go through Windows Explorer to the files on the FP3 player (the e: drive on my machine). Right click on the playlist and select properties. Then uncheck “read only” and click OK and you should be good to go. Seems that the software was getting hung up trying to write to the playlist, which is set to read only.
I apologize if this was already mentioned…I scanned through the posts and didn’t see if anywhere…but is there anyway to make this work on a MAC? We had installed it on our previous (PC) computer and were thrilled with it…but now that we have our new MAC I haven’t been able to update it for months!
Any suggestions…or do I need to look for another MP3 player for him?
Thanks!
I purchased the fisher price fp3 player and have misplace the software disc to install on the computer. What site can I download software?
Kudos to Brandon for his work and I think know what is happening to all the others that cannot write to the device. When it was manufactured, all of the files were set with the Read only bit set on all of the files.
When a song is written to the device, it adds the track, then it will update either the playlist.sng (songs) or playlist.sty (story). If these files are set to read only, then they can not update the internal playlist and the player will not know about any new tracks.
Short story to get it working with XP, Vista or whatever - When you connect it to you machine and the drive pops up; right click playlist.sng and then choose properties. Uncheck the attribute for Read only. Then do the same for playlist.sty. It should work fine for everything, and the access errors will disappear.
The run-arounds that FP said about it not being a network computer for DeAnna is completely off base.
Okay, I love the player. It is sturdy. It is easy for my kids to use. It can be put in portable speakers like a boom box. That’s great. That said, I ABSOLUTELY HATE THE SOFTWARE! It is the major source of my headache with this player. Our family moved overseas and our PC died of a power surge. Had it not been for this author’s original post, I might NEVER have known that it is impossible to register the player on multiple machines. I could not find that information on the Fisher Price website (again, poorly designed). I could not find it in the FAQs on the CD. Thank you for helping me with this problem.
XP users….
I have had a terrible time using the Fisher Price software on my XP machine. It has never worked! I can rip a CD but cannot copy the FP3 files to the player. Brandon’s hint for Vista users works well, in the process of following his suggestion I noticed an XP error message that referred to encrypted files. The upshot…. I have been encrypting all of my files, however, the FP software will NOT work on encrypted files! Simply un-encrypt the music files in the “c:\users\yourusername\music\fisher-price\fp3 player” directory and the FP software works (at least for me).
Here’s my FP3 issue: I have no problem downloading CD’s into the software UNTIL it gets to the last song. Doesn’t matter what CD it is, I always get an error message and it fails to download the last song. Anyone else have this problem? Thanks!
Thanks Bradon - you saved my brain from turning to moosh!
Kinda wishing I’d just waited until Little Miss was a bit older (she’s turning 2 this month) and gotten her an el cheapo MP3 player… nevermind, at least I can still use the blasted thing!
@Amanda: “do I need to look for another MP3 player for him?”
Sadly, yes.
@Natasha: “What site can I download software?”
If you re-read the post, you’ll see that is but one of the frustrating issues with this product…you CAN’T download the software. ;o)
@Tony: “Okay, I love the player…I ABSOLUTELY HATE THE SOFTWARE!”
That is the biggest crime, IMHO. Obviously FP spent money on quality industrial design and engineering. It *is* a great device…completely crippled via DRM and bad software.
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