[RWoelk]

Well, I have talked a number of die hard windows users into buying an iPod, or rather this sweet device just sells itself. I load my music on them until a final client for Xplay becomes available. Currently, this windows client(XPlay) is at preview 5. One such user has bought the western digital FireWire card with two ports recommended on Xplay's site. His dell running 98 SE sees the card and it appears to charge the iPod, but no drive letter appears under I.E. or "my computer" for his iPod. Yet he was able to engage the restore wizard and reformat the iPod to a factory fresh condition wiping out my music placed there. I had him install the Update for 1394 Storage Peripherals for Win98SE to no avail. Any suggestions?

Also, I seem to recall reading that one needs to purchase the PRO version of windows media player in order to convert downloaded music to MP3 files over that of it's proprietary format. Is this true? I think he is running WMP 7.1 or above.

Thanks for any assistance you might care to offer.

i have a friend with a pc and an ipod aswell and he finds xplay too buggy he uses ephpod now and is very happy with it. wich is also free
http://www.mentaljewelry.org/ephpod/

[RWoelk]

Thanks for chiming in... Yeah, I have considered suggesting ephpod, but many folks are having good success with Xplay's preview 5 and it seems more versatile.

[RWoelk]

I understand there is a ton of third party window's software to do this free, but still, does anyone know if one must purchase the pro-Windows media player in order to convert it's WMP files to MP3's or can this be done with the freely bundled version with most window's versions???