I've always liked Red Chair Software, the company who makes Notmad Explorer, the software I use to transfer files to my MP3 player. Their software is way more intuitive than Creative's own software, plus they have fast service and are very helpful. This weekend I was reminded of all these things.

A few months ago my grandparents had bought a small iRock 256mb MP3 player but could never figure out how to use it. When my mom and Natalia went up to Arizona a few weeks ago, they ended up buying them a simpler player, and my grandparents said I could have this one. I was happy because I had been looking for a small player to use when running.

However, I liked the idea of the AutoFill feature of the iPod Shuffle, and wanted to see if I could replicate it. Since this is one of those MP3 players that just looks like an external drive in My Computer when you connect it to the computer, I figured it shouldn't be too hard to write a little program to pick songs at random from my music collection and copy them to the player until it was full. But I figured it'd be a waste to have it have to go through and figure out what songs I have every time, when Notmad Explorer already keeps a listing of the files in my music collection. I sent an email to Red Chair asking if they could explain the format of the file where they store that listing so my program could read it.

The guy who responded said they couldn't give out that information, but he reminded me that Notmad Explorer supports many different Creative MP3 players, one of which is the Muvo, which also appears as an external drive in Windows. In fact, Notmad's Muvo support includes a feature called Tunes2Go which basically works just like iTunes' AutoFill. He suggested I try to use Notmad's Muvo support with the iRock by using the configuration setting to manually set the drive letter of my "Muvo."

However, Notmad is available in two different forms. The single-device license only supports one type of Creative MP3 player, but costs around $25. The universal license is $35 but includes the modules for every type of Creative MP3 player. Since I've only ever had Nomad Jukebox Zens, I only had the single device license. In order to get Notmad's Muvo support I'd have to upgrade to the Universal license.

I asked if he could find out for sure that it would work with the iRock before I spent the money on the license the money. He said that since he couldn't be sure whether it would work, he just gave me the upgrade for free. I just think that's cool as hell. You don't get that kind of treatment with big companies. It reminded me why I recommend them so heartily to everyone I know.

If you're curious, it turns out that the Muvo support does work just fine with the iRock, and so my problem is solved and I'm happy.