(formerly)tangentmind.org

I think I kind of overreacted about Buslink. I was just mad because my mp3 player didn't work. Their website seems to be in some kind flux. I was looking at it yesterday and it changed the same day. I check it the next day and it changed again. It could be a little more professional looking too. They have a support forum but it's not linked to. I think maybe the support is run by one guy. He was the one I saw most in the forum and I think he might be the same guy I talked to when I called the support. Maybe it wasn't the same guy I talked to, but it's at least the same guy who e-mailed me after I called. I never got a reply from the e-mail I sent. Maybe the support guy(Spike is his name) was just too busy.
This is what happened when I called tech support. I called, got an automated message. Pressed 1 for PC products, music started playing. It was "It's a beautiful morning" or whatever that song is called...I think birds were tweating. A voice said "Ahhhh, what a great day" then an automated message was heard and the voice said "Well it was!" and at the point the support guy picked up(possibly Spike?). I think he just said "Hello" so I kind of stammered and then told him my mp3 player didn't work and told him what was wrong with it. He told me he would e-mail me a bios flashing program and then, if it didn't work, e-mail support and tell them I needed to replace it.
That was it. He really didn't say much. He didn't lead me through anything. He just said he would send me the e-mail. I didn't know if I should stay on the line and wait for it to come or just hang up. I hung up, but he didn't say bye or good luck or thank you for calling or anything so I wondered if maybe I was supposed to stay on the line. The e-mail had instructions for running the program. I used it and it worked. What's odd is that the bios revision in the flash utility was exactly the same as the one on my mp3 player, so it didn't flash it to a newer version. Maybe the rom got corrupted or something. I don't know.

Edit: I just checked and there is a new option called "Navigation", I think it allows me to flip through the songs and displays about three of them, instead of only the one that it displays in normal mp3 mode. So, it must be different. There are many differen't 3-in-1 mp3 player based on the same sigmatel design. They all look very similar though. Kind of like this. I have read they some of them have different functionality though. Most, if not all, of them have this little multifunctional toggle on the top that works as a button and can move back and forth from navigation. My toggle lets me fast forward reverse and change songs. The volume is a separate thing but I don't think all of them work that way so this bios might be for those devices that don't have the tracking toggle or something. I dunno.

This whole ordeal makes me wonder if maybe buslink is only like a few employees. I don't think buslink is too bad, but if you're looking for a 3-in-1 mp3 player device with the sigmatel design, one of them with usb 2.0 support might work better than the buslink device which uses USB 1.1.

For the record, the problem I had was that I was copying a file on the mp3 player and weird files and folder started showing up on the device. I couldn't delete them or alter them in any way. They had weird character names like you might see if you went to a japanese sight and didn't have a japanese font. The files either said they were 0kb in size or that they were something insane like 60 GB. After that, the device said it was full and that it had no mp3s or voice files on it. The "about" section said that the device was 32mb - it really has 256mb - and had no space free. So I formatted it, but that didn't help; it only got rid of the weird files. I could copy files onto it but the device still said it had no space and no mp3 and was 32mb.

I can post the firmware flashing utility if anyone else out there has this problem and and needs to fix it.
Note: I used the words firmware, rom, and bios interchangeably.