Well, the good news: My 128 MB Smart Media card and card reader arrived from Tiger Direct today. (Smart Media, it turns out, is pretty dumb: Wafer-thin card that's bigger than other flash media formats and looks waa-aaaay more delicate.) I was happy to find this card at all; Smart Media is going the way of the dinosaur . . .

The plan was, I would use the card in my MP3 player and boost the available memory up to 192 MB. Not great - but I'd at least be able to download a couple of the CBC radio podcasts I've got in the queue . . . So, I put the card in the player, and plugged it in to the USB port on my computer. The player doesn't know it's got a card in it, alas. So, I got out the card reader, put in the card, and loaded it up with stuff and put it back in to the MP3 player. No go.

I seemed to remember that the original user manual said something about formatting the card. So, since I no longer have the original disk - or, to put it more accurately, the original disk is one of 6567658768769869876 CDs currently stored in the basement in near-random fashion (including cute kids' games that run on 386s and stuff - and yes, we do have 386s to run them on, although I, personally, cannot ever imagine doing so . . . ) - anyhow, since needles in haystacks and camels through the eyes of said needles would be easier than finding the darned thing, I went to the Classic web site.

Which, I was pleased to see, still exists. There's a paucity of stuff there, though. There were updated drivers and some firmware, but no manual. I downloaded the drivers and firmware, thinking they might help.

Here's where my tale takes a tragic turn. For some reason, my version of Windows XP has been acting up: It won't recognize devices plugged in to the USB ports through the operating system; you actually have to go into an application to see files on USB devices. (This is currently a real hassle with my digital camera files; I have to go into Photoshop to delete files, and I can't see the movie files that way. I tried going into Quicktime to delete the movie files, but QT won't delete them. So my card is gradually filling up with .MOV files . . . Not insurmountable - we do, after all, have other computers - but inconvenient.)

Anyway, for some reason, this had not been an issue with the MP3 player. So, I'd been able to drag and drop files from my podcast download folder to the MP3 player. When I updated the drivers, though, I lost this ability.

So then I spent a frustrating 90 minutes on the Windows site, hoping to find something in the knowledgebase that addressed this problem. No go.

So basically, I now have to load files on my MP3 player by going in to an application for this purpose (which, thank heavens, I have). It's slow going, though, and not very convenient . . . and I didn't get any closer to being able to read the extended memory, either . . .

I have an email in to Classic tech support, so I hope I'll get an answer soon (if they still read their email, that is . . . this thing is awfully old . . . ) I'm totally bummed, because I really like listening to podcasts . . .