Accessories

Not so kid tough
We bought this for our 5 year old 2 months ago for her birthday. We bought a 1 GB SD card for it so that she could put tons of music on it. As far as the software goes, we didn't find it to be that painful since we had read the reviews knew what to expect. She loved the player and especially the speakers that we bought separately. She played it every night to fall asleep and carried the player in the speakers everywhere with her. Now it's been only two months and the player hardly works. We have replaced the batteries twice to thinking that would solve the problems but it didn't. A few days ago it froze and I had to unscrew the battery compartment to get it to turn off. Only the forward button works, so if she wants to change songs, she can only go forwards through all the songs. Also, the play button seems to be very fragile. It seems to play the preloaded songs (all 6 of them!) and she really likes the stories, but the ones that we loaded ourselves either don't play at all or they stop playing in the middle with a loud popping noise. I know she is disappointed, and so am I. She has stopped listening to it altogether. I bought this player brand new from a seller on Ebay (lesson learned) so now I am out of luck. I was hoping that Fisher Price would have some techincal support on their website with some updated drivers or something, but no. I am disappointed in this product. It's a great concept, but needs some improvements. With all the technology available today and the price, it seems like it could be so much better. On their website it says that this product has been discontinued in 2007. How come my 2GB Ipod shuffle works without a glitch and I paid close to the same price? Maybe Fisher Price just needs to stick to what they know.

Excellant FUN !!
Bought for my 3 yr old grand-daughters BD. Easy to download songs from a CD through the computer. Also easy to download from the website at extra cost, and they have a pretty good selection to chose from. They also have pictures that you can attach to the songs for those that can't read yet, which is very helpful although I wish there were a bigger selection of pictures, not quite enough. Another problem is that you have to buy the speakers separately (also the protective case) and you really need them to enjoy all the fun with them. Very worth buying, just precious watching them sing and dance and learning all the words to songs. Her 1 1/2 yr old sister sings and dances with her when speakers are attached.

good idea but very complicated
A very good idea, but a complete pain to load songs on to. I bought two and the first took so long to do that a year later I still have not attempted the other one.

Fixing problem with not writing to device
This is a solution to all the others that cannot write new songs to the device. it looks like when some of these devices were manufactured, all of the files were set with the Read only bit set on all of the files.

When a song is written to the device, it adds the track, then it will update either the playlist.sng (songs) or playlist.sty (story). If these files are set to read only, then they can not update the internal playlist and the player will not know about any new tracks, and you will get the write access error.

Short story to get it working with XP, Vista or whatever - When you connect it to you machine and the drive pops up; right click playlist.sng and then choose properties. Uncheck the attribute for Read only. Then do the same for playlist.sty. It should work fine for everything, and the access errors will disappear.

I hope this helps some people out.

PS. I was called in to resolve this problem because parents of the device could not get it working

FP3 player- good to go!
Although I was a little apprehensive to purchase this product based on the reviews I read, I went ahead and ordered it anyway. My daughter had played with a friend's FP3 player and absolutely loved it, and it was a good price point to give to her as her main Easter gift. I'm pleased to say that I had no problems following the directions, loading the software, downloading songs, and adding songs from our own cd collection. It takes a bit longer than I thought to copy cd's to my computer in order to then copy them on to the cd player, but that's been the only hiccup. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that there is also a feature where you can create your own icons to download to the player to identify songs. My daughter loves the player, and we are pleased that we chose it!