Unlike last time I had a Sprint Ambassador handset, this time I'm much more interested in the music aspects of it.  That probably has something to do with the fact that the phone supports A2DP and I have relatively comfortable headphones that also happen to support A2DP.  This allows me to listen to the music in some sort of high quality way and through the headphone I listed to just about everything else with. 

Unfortunately, the entire experience has been with some frustration.  The basic experience of downloading songs via the Music Store on the handset and playing them on the handset has been just fine.  In fact, it's very fast, works really well, and the songs sound great even though they are relatively small and a whole lot can fit on the included 64MB card.  The music recommendations work pretty well and the "Others Bought" and "More by this Artist" features help find more songs you might not know or might want.

The Sprint music store also allows for PC downloads of anything you've purchased on your computer.  It also allows for backing up of your handset music to your computer.  You can't play it there, but if you delete music on your handset, you can't download it again.  The handset music is in a protected AAC+ format, which is the reason why it can be so small yet still have very good audio fidelity.  On the desktop side, standard protected WMA files are used.  It's on the PC side where all of my problems started.

I tried logging in to the Sprint site to download my music (www.sprint.com/digitallounge).  First, I couldn't get the password retrieval to work.  Finally, after quite some time of trying, I got a single SMS with the password.  I then couldn't log in.  The site kept saying there was some technical error on the back end.  Finally, I tried Internet Explorer rather than Firefox and got logged in.  After downloading one song, I was prompted to login again.  This time, I couldn't.  Neither the password that it sent to me nor the one that I had set worked.  I tried requesting a new one, but this didn't work.

A couple of days later, I tried again.  I finally got back in with a new password and using IE only.  I then downloaded a bunch more music.  I then launched WMP11 to play it on my machine (the Sony UX280P with Vista, of course).  This didn't, and still doesn't, work.  The files are listed as having copy protection, but in the licensing tab there is no information about it.  It's very odd.

So, I thought maybe I was missing something.  After some searching around on the Sprint site, I gave up with trying to find any downloads for Vista.  The CD even listed XP as required.  Well, the CD also had a URL on it that I didn't recognize.  I went to it and there they had a Vista version of the music manager.  So, I downloaded and installed it.  That took two reboots.  One for the installation and one to fix whatever went wrong when I ran it for the first time.

The music manager requires the USB cable to be used with the UpStage.  It also shows my UpStage as having 0 bytes used of 0 bytes total.  I couldn't figure out how to sync any music to the phone at all.  I would start, but never give status or anything.  When I finally tried to close the application, it said there was a sync pending.  Well, if there was, it was going at a bit a minute.  Maybe.

The Sprint Music Manager is even more of a joke than just not working.  The content tab is just a browser window that brings you to the normal login location.  It doesn't even short cut you to the download site.  So, naturally, it didn't anything new to work that was broken.  Although, when trying to play the music through it, there was no detection of errors. The status would say playing, but naturally nothing was playing and the play time wouldn't change.

Now, to be fair, I haven't had time to call the Ambassador support line to see if they can tell me what I'm doing wrong.  However, I don't think it's supposed to be this hard!  Well, I'll post more information later if things start working...

Posted by Shane on May 1, 2007 8:44 AM | Permalink