Computer updates II

The week here has seen the installation of the new full laptop while you know who gets used to their Chromebook having found a photo processing app so actually they can most of the things they need.
Here, my first task was to re-install dbPoweramp from the email link I used back in 2014 when I bought a family license which is a program that allows for copying your cds to either full cd quality but smaller lossless files such as Free Lossless (Flac) or Apples form called Alac or forms that remove some elements of the music that (many people believe) cannot be heard as our ears tend to mask softer sounds next to loud sounds of a similar frequency such as the evergreen Mp3 which in the form they use is actually very good.
It finds you the track and artist information and adds the album art to the folder.
I also installed Roxio's Photosuite 5, a program from 2005 that amazingly still runs on modern forms of Windows which is simple lightweight program for touching up pictures and making simple captions.

There have been media players of various sorts over the years often multimedia ones but as Microsoft dropped its Windows Media Player from Windows 10 I went back in time and installed the evergreen Winamp 5.666 which in various forms I had used since 2003 simply because it's a very good music player that plays most formats and nothing else that displays album art and has a pull down equalizer if needed. For video there's always VLC.

 Because I get confused and aren't much good looking at onscreen guides and remembering what they said as I do it, I got this basic guide in everyday english to help me find my way around various options and where things are compared to Windows 7

This is a Targus classic clamshell premium laptop bag, designed for MacBooks and smaller windows laptops like my Lenovo X230.
It has two sectioned pockets, a wide section  for note books of the paper kind and another shallow set to take thinks you need together with your laptop with you and keep it protected.
As for that first image actually that goes back to 2008 and my original internet service provider which was used for a period under my signature box.

Unexpected pauses

Unfortunately my much anticipated post for this week will not be happening due to a big technical hitch that occurred originally on Tuesday and after a resumption for a brief period has continued for a few days.
You might recall I bought a laptop around June 2012 and had been using that for much of the work as the desktop computer I have is currently 8 years old and probably was at least 2 years older than that before I bought it used but professionally refurbished around October 2006.
That's a very very long time ago, like  but a few months after I started this here blog and it's fair to say it's fallen well behind what is needed to use modern websites and social media was rather more someone shouting "Isn't that amazing" as they heard an Mp3 or video playing from the internet than the likes of Tumblr, Twitter, Google Plus or Facebook so a miserly 256MB of RAM isn't much use today apart from the sad fact that older computers just get slower as the years go by.
The short no technical bits of it are it won't come on and recognize what it is (a Compaq) and then load up Windows 7 preferring to flash every tw seconds  with a black screen instead. I hope a in a few days to be able to return to normal service but in the meantime to please bear with me as that ancient computer is very poor at media heavy sites like Google Plus and Tumblr and even stalls  on regular sites from time to time.

Unwanted guests

I'm a pretty cautious kind of a person all round and that transfers over to my internet habits pretty much but today's admittedly brief entry is about what can fox even the best of us.
I am usually super careful regarding sites I visit and especially programs that rely on what are called executionals to be installed directly to your computer, checking for unwanted things but I was caught out by a nasty trick.
In essence, the downloaded program give me two runs with customizing options  where you can opt not to install things but it seems on the second when it asked about installing a toolbar when I decline it, rather than springing back and instead of saying in effect "you don't want to play to my conditions so go away and think again" it decided to install them even though I'd unchecked them and trying to reset this wasn't an option as it kept reinstalling itself.
Youch!
In the end I googled the toolbar concerned and found instructions on how to be rid of it which worked although it took up a lot of time as it attached itself to the three internet browsers and in the end I imported all my Firefox bookmarks Excluding search engine options into Google Chrome (which needed properly synching anyway) deleted Firefox and then installed a clean version after removing the programs filed from Windows programs reimporting my bookmarks.

The changing face of computing

I just love this illustration  for the Microsoft Surface tablet that converts to a netbook although one hopes you can tweak the operating system to restore the Start button replace Internet Exploder 10 with Firefox or Chrome and install Foxit PDF reader rather than the bloated Adobe one that nags you every two to three weeks.
In 2012 we expect to keep up to speed with life online so products like this slot much better into our personal lives than old style desk top computers that still may have advantages for some types of work.
Having just visited one forum where this came up, I''ll end by saying online North American English is very prevalent and whatever your feelings around that might be, it's as well to get to grips with it.

Image capture - a few thoughts

I was just reading for what was for  once an interesting discussion on Amazon and feel like writing an extended response here.
Man has been in love with images for a extremely long time, noting his favourite or most important images in caves or drawings on paper moving into what we call today painting with paints. They document his times, his civilization and important events he wanted permanent records of to share with subsequent generations. The Victorian era saw advances in chemistry making it possible to store images using emulsion based film moving through ever more easier to use film based cameras before in the last decade of the twentieth century it became commercially viable to store such images as digital images on silicon chips both in cameras and also other devices such as cellphones and tablet computers.
That series of changes over time fuelled millions of people to create and store their own images of family, vacations past, their local communities as well as those who were paid to create images for local media initially newspapers and magazines but increasingly internet based sites.
For much of this era regardless of the final means of capture and storage their have been two main types of camera made depending very much on personal needs.
The first group were mainly for ordinary people who required something simple to use usually a single item of equipment for capturing family pictures and vacation snapshots with a single unchangeable lens.
The second was more around people who needed equipment that allowed a higher degree of control, the options of many interchangeable lenses for specialized uses such as close ups, sports, etc, elaborate flash systems for low light photography and so on.
These were aimed mainly at professionals who work for the press, magazines and the wedding and glamour market.
A secondary line was established using less expensive  camera bodies designed for more delicate usage by amateurs who wanted more control  than everyday cameras supporting a smaller and usually less expensive set of lenses and accessories, trading on the image of the professional models.
Such cameras were the first to use plastics initially for levers and take up spools and later on to the whole outer body.
The digital revolution  has to an extent blurred the line between so called compact cameras and  the pro sumer all in ones that offer the equivalents of 7 or more fixed focal length lenses on a single long zoom lens. Often compact cameras have 3.4 or more times zoom lenses fitted too.
Equally for all those whose employers wanted digital from the mid 1990's,  it led to Nikon and Canon ditching their professional single lens reflex film bodies with interchangeable lenses, that move lead to packaging plastic digital bodies and lenses to offer the same immediacy to enthusiastic amateurs.
The battleground for sales it seems is routed in the numbers of megapixels each body uses in much the same way that in pre-digital times the numbers of exposure modes offered and their metering options were pushed.
It always amazed me the number of times I showed people of photographs shot on a camera system focused by hand, carefully metered by a human, shot using a single focal  length high quality lens properly supported.
They didn't understand my equipment with less bragging rights than theirs produced better pictures for intervention, human knowledge and an oft forgotten maxim an image is only as sharp as the optic focused on it itself permits.
Many of the cheap zoom type lenses packaged with them, were of lower quality and critically offered less scope for controlling how much in front and behind of what you had focused on was in sharp focus.
An unfortunate by-product of using lenses designed originally with film use in mind on digital bodies is that it's harder to get background out of focus because the focal length for any setting is bigger and also the sensors don't render as much out of focus at wider aperture settings. The only real cure would be to have designed new lenses to work with digital sensors in  mind which is what Olympus did with their digital single lens reflex bodies.
This problem may not be an issue for vacation snapping where most of the time you want most things in sharp focus but is for creative photography.
It is one reason apart from some undoubtedly preferring the kind of image film makes for some of us to continue with their older film systems for work with less of short time frame requirement having our images scanned at the point of processing 

Less productive time

I only wish I felt this alive right now.
I've had a long day not really being helped by spending the preceding day catching up on sleep from the day wired to the blood pressure monitoring that wasn't much fun.
We did some works case records training and it was obvious from the outset that not one of liked or used the scripts and that we feel we're being held to account for outcomes that were those chosen by supervisors all of which having differing ideas on what is best outcome and if appointments are needed. And that's one thing we can marked down on.
I always record as joint me plus supervisor determines outcome to throw back some ownership for the decision making.
I felt they needed to have common training for supervisors first so they all know when an appointment was needed etc and then cascade that down to us.
It's not that training around this isn't a good idea it's simply you have to start from the top having established common practise .

Tv or not tv as we know it?

Isn't modern life surprising,eh?
Take Tv for instance in the UK we had four followed by Five free to air tv channels available by an antenna in the 1990's.
If you wanted more channels you'd either get cable which Cranford Central sure isn't an option or you'd subscribe to Sky TV a subscription based satellite service that provides packages which I had for several years changing from analogue to digital over that time.
The service wasn't bad, but it was expensive and you have to take all the subscription regular channels to get either sports or film channels. I wasn't in much to take full use of it.
I tried ONdigital which reception issues aside (believe you me I had to have the biggest most sensitive antenna fixed in the whole neighbourhood to get this part subscription digital tv via the antenna service with reasonable reception out here) wasn't bad as it gave most of the stuff I wanted at a reasonable price only to have it go in administration.
When the digital tv over the antenna service was reconfigured in 2002 to a very wide choice of free to watch channels from the likes of the BBC, ITV, Channels 4 and five, I stuck with that, just keeping the old sky box for a select few satellite only free channels I  watch downstairs.
Imagine my surprise then to find it was possible to subscribe to the sports channel British Eurosport which I missed entirely online in HD widescreen for a mere £2.99 per month and having now gotten decent fibre broadband I had a fast clean connection to make it work.
Plus connection permitting I can use it on a tablet PC via Wifi anywhere!
With that I updated the M$Silverlight to the latest version on the laptop having deleted the old one and immediately set up an account paying via PayPal cos I don't like handing my card details out if I can help it.
It really works so with a combination of two British Europsport channels (with extra one offs) streamed HD anime from CR and my free to air tv channels I'm getting just the kind of tv I like at a price I feel is reasonable.

Surrender

HP wireless Lan on, that's a good start to blog I think sat in front of the laptop today.
Well, over here we're in awe of the Olympics with some events taking place in nearby Manchester despite all that London 2012 stuff, it's much wider than that and I'm thinking back to the first Olympics I recall watching, the '76 ones in Montreal, QE.
That takes me back to an artist who was jam hot back then, Diana Ross and specifically the 'Black Album' that helped rise the bar of  emergent disco with the classic Love Hangover seguing from soft soul to full on disco as well as tracks such as Do You Know Where You're Going To? and her cover of the Charles Chaplin song, Smile. Well recently the specialty arm of Univerrsal, Hip-O reissued it with alternative mixes and previously unreleased songs all freshly re-mastered on 2 cds.
That's no bad thing as a number of those early Motown cds do sound at best mediocre and some downright edgy and for years they've been the only ones on the market. This double issue of Diana Ross (1976) is a big improvement on the old 80's American cd and comes close to my original UK Tamla_Motown lp with more transparency and presence.
I also got a number of other titles issued over the years in this series by Hip-O although one - the Expanded edition of Last Time I Saw Him - is out of print on cd so I went to my favourite download store, 7Digital and bought a 320Kbps download of it. You don't have install any fancy software on your computer as you can get the 'Zip file' download option, and using the extraction tool built into Windows, extract to the Music library to ply or share with your digital music player.
I'll proceed to annoy the audio purists by saying in my opinion, the download did sound really good being better than a number of cds I've bought new!
The titles so far In I have are, Diana aka Ain't No Mountain High Enough, Everything Is Everything, Surrender including the UK#1 I'm Still Waiting, Touch Me In The Morning, Last Time I Saw Him (Her country flavoured set) and Diana Ross. I hope they tackle Baby It's Me as my old cd suffers from 'sticky top syndrome' being made by Nimbus here in the UK when this accident was common in the late 80's and I'd love to replace it.

Communication breakdown

Getting hot don't you think?
The day got off to good start when my digital set top box that thing that feeds my old school tv decided to expire. I mean I woke up earlier with it still being warm at 4:30AM putting on the BBC's news channel to catch up with the latest G4S disasters, dozed back of to sleep only to wake up at 5:15 to an alternating black screen and white noise from the old built in analogue tuner in the TV itself!
I bought this around late October 2006 when my old STB a Nokia left by ONdigital, the worlds first Digital tv via an antenna company, was liquidated in 2002 and I've a fair idea of what happened. It's most likely to be  power supply issue involved a couple of capacitors that have gone short circuit having leaked. It's a very common problem in consumer electronics as to keep costs down, they use underrated components assuming by time they've failed, you'll sent it to landfill and buy another. I just might unscrew it and have a go fixing it although I found a dirt cheap replacement in a local charity store that's a deadringer for it using the same chassis but just different switches and a marginally different remote.
I'm tempted to look for a FreeviewHD USB adapter for the laptop instead as it can handle 720P pictures. 
Sunday saw a big fibre trunk outage that made using the internet for chat rooms a pain as it was taking over a minute for a few words you typed to come back. From what I read while at work, it covered Devon up to Manchester via Birmingham as as somehow they internet things I'm in Wolverhampton of all places and they'd get their feed from Brum, that's what happened running through midnight Sunday. It's been fine afterwards but after  over a week of well nigh perfect broadband and darn quick uploading, it left me a bit down.
This afternoon I'll watch the Women's soccer on the BBC the first pre Olympic event.

Sunshine girl

Downpours, eh? We sure had them in the last few days here with me doing a drown rat impression while catching the bus to walk or strolling down toward the corner store and as I commented to the Nurse a week back, it sure gets me down not being able to go out.
Still, today at long last we have sunshine so much so that my idea of great stuff to put and and sit out in is more like this:

Exactly! Modest, comfortable, and ideal should you still have a mania for jumping around water be it a pool or playing with water pistols as that sure would cool you off.

The internet got changed over this week without incident and so far I've only had a one minute dropout which is so much better than what I was experiencing before and that's before you take into account  the radical improvements in download and upload speeds which makes watching or listening to streamed service a much better experience. So much so I was able to listen to the HD streamed audio of the First Night of the Proms classical music concert in better than FM quality last night.

I'm streamlining some of the programs on my old desktop before it inevitable makes it way to the scrapyard in the sky as some like Thunderbird while being an excellent Email program, is something I haven't used since switching to webmail in 2008, I no longer use the sector to sector cd copying program EAC and I no longer have many office documents to deal with so I've replaced OpenOffice.org with AbiWord that just does word based documents. Having a Google account, I have web access to Google Docs for more if I really need a spreadsheet or database.
I may try installing and running CCCleaner to remove the rubbish that gets stick in the registry over the years.

Ziggy Stardust

A few weeks and forty odd years ago an album was issued that became in many respects bigger than the artists own profile dominating the popular music scene for 1972/3.
It's an album almost  every student of any generation feels they have to heard never mind own regardless of what format may be prevailent at the time and it was a major musical and social influence either on me at that time.
Ziggy Stardust is a character - a singer in a rock band - and through him we see his raise to fame and tellingly his burn out that mirrors all too sadly what actually happens in real life. Everybody wants a piece of his pie from the management team, record label  even ultimately, the fans themselves and the artist struggles to "Hang on to yourself" to quote the title of one of the songs featured.
If the Monkees were a made for TV fabrication of a rock group based upon the Beatles, here was in many ways a more credible fabrication for the modern era -  a complete fabrication from individuals persona onward.
If one goes down Heddon Street, London the buildings in the cover shot can be seen although the trash can and K West sign are long gone.
The first single off the album was Starman and I recall the first time I heard that on the radio well being aware from the billboards and older friends of this Bowie character. What got to me about was -and still is - is the sense of detachment, alienation even of the lead character in the lyrics and the unamerican style of singing.
I first had the album on RCA 8 track tape although my brother had the lp and have been through cassette and cd versions.
This album has been re-issued numerous times and unfortunately like most of David Bowie's back catalogue their is no such thing as a really good cd version although on the advice of a friend of mine, Keith H in Ohio, I got the original RCA cds from the mid 1980's which were more listenable than either the thin sounding EMI (US: Ryko) titles from 1990/91 with bonus tracks or Peter Mew's bloated and highly compressed versions from 1999 on EMI (US: Virgin).
In 1990 a boxed edition was issued by EMI with a  72 page booklet with the regular cd
recognizing it's iconic status and this June  two new editions came out.
The cd version is just a straight re-issue of the 11 track album in a card digpack cover which I can't say I really like as packaging preferring Mini Lp style i we're having paper based.
While there is a little compression on it compared to the 1984 RCA, the tonality is spot on and let's be honest here the analogue to digital conversion technology has come an awful lot in 28 years (I can hear the convertors' sound on many older cds) so for the first time ever there is a pretty acceptable in print cd even though I won't be tossing out the RCA.
Secondly and even better news is that there was a new lp lovingly mastered by Ray Staff who used to work at Porky's mastering that many of us feel surpasses the original UK orange RCA lp when it comes to sound quality and dead quiet surfaces. It comes with a audio dvd that will play on a computer or Blue-ray player capable of 96khz/24Bit resolution (most do) offering  both stereo and 5.1 surround sound mixes with bonus tracks which will sound smoother than the regular cd.
Recommended.

400 entries!

Did anyone notice something last week?
Actually peoples that was the 400th post of this blog of mine that has been running for just over 6 years and in it's current form for about three when I woke up around 4AM with this amazingly amazing idea of what I wanted by way of content and critically how I wanted the whole look to be including its new title. Good job I had a note pad and pen by my bed don't you think to write it all down, eh?
And if you haven't sussed it out, I talk here about anything really from furry creatures to the state of the Euro taking in the odd thing about music so it's very eclectic.
When I first started it, it was only a few weeks after getting a broadband internet connection which for the benefit of younger readers meant not only didn't you hear no funny dialling up tones every time you wanted to connect and no more missing phone calls cos the computer was using the line, it now was permanently on. It made using websites and writing a blog a lot easier.
Well kinda as those of you who know me know how goddam awful my current providers service is not helped for good measure by being over 2 miles from the telephone exchange so soon I'll be switching provider and upgrading to Fibre to the cabinet as at long last the major telecoms provider here has fibre connected the area up.
I've been spending part of the week tidying up  some of my account details as back in 2008 I switched most of my email to  professional web based  services in part to enable easier email access form places like work and also to reduce any issues if I moved home or changed provider as many people back then had their email provided by whoever their  internet. provider was whereas today most of use don't (hands up you GMail users!) and check our emails on smartphones, tablets as well as laptop or desktop computers. Otherwise it would be change your provider, lose your emails unless you backed them up and even then you'd have to change all your details up again which is a pain for internet shopping and that.
I set a number of old accounts just to redirect to my web mail for speed but only discovered a few I still use a lot  hadn't be properly changed on the sites so I changed my details at Serif and Bestuff amongst others ready for when this internet provider gets turned off. Equally I got a Type N 150 USB wifi adaptor for this old desktop although I plan to get a laptop with built in wifi soonish, as there's quite a distance from where my phone master sockets is  where the engineers will install their stuff and where the desktop is situated and I'll be using both through the transition no doubt.
Until the next entry folks, bye and thanks for reading the blog all those years.

July round up

Hey folks it's sure shaping up to be a odd kind of a week here.First off the bat, I've finally gotten this monitor business sorted as I've taken stock of a newer LCD monitor as my old CRT one that was over 10 years old was starting to develop a fault on it making it very uncomfortable to read stuff from.This Dell one doesn't suffer from the pincushion distortion that made trying to align the display a pain in the proverbials.

Unfortunately Moomin's been poorly this week so I've had to spend some time looking after her although luckily it wasn't a vet job as the fees are really expensive. I think she's had a bit of a mini stroke that's left her a bit unco-ordinated but able to remember surroundings.

Also it was a shock to read of the suicide inquest report of the partner of one of my best friends following a period of mental illness which I used to spend a fair amount of my time visiting and generally keeping in touch with. Seemingly, she found him upon returning to the house with the children only to find him hanging on a wire suspended with on the ground a bottle of vodka and a note.I do really feel for her and the children.Having been through one painful suicide , that of my very best friend from high school sometime back from mental illness all I can say is if something is troubling you please do talk to others and get help.

Social Networking Sites

Today's a funny kind of a day a day cos I woke up with a bit of an idea for this blog entry which I can assure you doesn't happen every day of the week.
Social Networking sites.
I think most of you know a bit about them and maybe you have accounts too but what do you think about them as places? Do you feel they offer you anything different than otherwise is available?
I ask because I have been asked several times by no doubt well meaning people if I belonged to certain sites or if I'd join them with those individuals as part of some group or other.

Now my experiences of sites my well be different than yours but I got burnt out by some forums by the internal politicking and also by the way some of those people carried over their squabbles from a Forum to these Social Networks even to the point of stalking them.
Call me naive perhaps but I thought the idea of a social network site was to have fun with your friends, share interests and maybe play a game together rather than returning to the school playground with the bullies.

I briefly joined one site together with my best online buddy and it was at the time quite an interesting place in that people wrote about their experiences, loves and likes in the idea that by doing this people could use this to help guide them though their own decisions. At the time a lot of deep friendships were made but then we noticed several disturbing developments.
One of the first was there seemed to be a ever increasing number of people joining up with strong sexual interests who wouldn't stop hitting on you with lewd suggestions and posting avatars with sexually graphic images.
We also noticed some seemed to wanted to base their own lives entirely around your thoughts and life which was in someways ways worse than have a copycat sister or brother even calling you a 'Guru'.
These were followed in short order by those of extreme political and religious points of view starting scraps and beating the c*** out of each other.
Then they decided to go 'mainstream' advertising in the mass media which brought in more 'odd balls'.
Most worrying was the toleration of overt paedophile groups that supported sex with children writing pieces supporting the same. As a person who worked in child protection for a period it made me sick to stomach seeing that stuff and no amount of reporting to the moderators ever really got rid of it. And for good measure at the same time they allowed children to sign up! Ouch!!!
This site was hosted and registered in the States which has very strict guidelines about sites that allow minors. Needless to say we left.

My Buddy tried Facebook but got fed up with people who couldn't handle status reports with more depth than "Bought a new handbag and going partying tonite . Whoo-woo" and unwanted male attention. Around this time she asked me to join I said what's it all about there and it was obvious she wasn't getting much from the social aspect with all it's shallowness from hundreds of so called friends. She kept the account their for the games but that wasn't much use for me cos because of my disability I can't use joysticks or mice for long which you need for gaming. Not being able to game hacks me off big time so don't even start me!
Also I was aware some folk from one Forum were regularly patrolling the place looking for folk to pick a fight with or gain friend status and then publish personal details elsewhere in their attempts to carry on Forum squabbles and unfortunately they had several issues with me even if I had none with them personally.
My Space was very similar.

We did join Tinier Me a gaming site primarily as it least it knew what it's focus was and anyway my Buddy loved dressing my character up as a Maid!
I recently joined Last FM because like Tinier Me it knows what it is - it's a music sharing site - where you share play lists, access virtual radio stations, can send friends tracks to listen to and generally widen you music tastes.
There's no silly scraps continuing on from elsewhere or unwanted attention so I enjoy getting a buzz sharing something I'm passionate about.

It might be me I don't know but when you belong to forums around specific interests like say Anime that offer PM and email links, follow the blogs of friends, can have accounts at games sites what am I missing?
You comments as ever are appreciated.

Sansa Personal Music Player

Coming soon is a new personal music player to better integrate with my PC audio needs and increased buying of Downloaded albums.
The history of this integration is a painful one involving buying several years ago a Sony Hi-MD recorder that was meant to enable easy file transfer from cd and downloaded Mp3's but was let down by rubbishy bug ridden software and its inability when connected up to transfer using the original stereo Mindisc standard for compatibility with my home deck with the advantage of automatic track naming which as an R.S.I. survivor would of been a godsend.
Said machine sits gathering dust most days as its own control interface is one of worst ergonomically of any recorder of any type I've ever owned and I struggle to use it with my condition.
Instead I use my Sharp MD portable which sounds really good to play discs recorded on the home deck (a Sony MDS JB940QS) in Stereo (or mono mode) for the best sound quality but to transfer program from PC I need to burn off the content as an audio cd and copy that in real time and then title it up by hand.
I love the format and don't mind a bit of titling but sometimes it would be easier to just transfer the file over to a player and listen to that and with Minidisc generally speaking it's one disc to take out with you for each album you might fancy listening to.
That's where this upcoming Sensa Clip+ player is meant to slot in as it handles Mp3, Wma (Windoze own format), The Open Source Ogg Vorbis as well as the lossless codec Flac which gives full cd quality native. It doesn't do Apples AAC but as I don't use iTunes and its store that's no loss plus with dbPoweramp's batch converter I can convert to Mp3 if someone got me a file in that form.
What it does have going for it is the capacity about 7.36GB after it's file management has taken a bite (or is that byte!) plus the ability to add an extra micro SD type card (up to 16GB) to expand it or slot in a selection of albums ready done for a low price.
If you buy one and for what Amazon are charging it could be just the thing for you I would visit the Sandisk website and download the full manual in American English as the instructions supplied with the player are a bit skimpy.
When you connect it to your computer using a USB to mini USB lead you'll see it as an external device via the usual interface - in Windows 'My Computer'.
Clicking on that to get to 'Internal memory' and then clicking that will get you to the folders when you drag and drop your music to.
I cheated a little and cut and pasted mine to 'Albums' rather than 'Music' as i don't use Windows Media Player and didn't feel liking having to.
If you didn't use Windows Media Player this next bit is critical:
When you have loaded the player use the down key (The one at 'Six o'clock') to go down to 'Folder'. okay that and hunt for 'Albums'. Having found the Album you want, okay that and okay play all for that album.
That way the player finds all the files (songs) in that album in the order you ripped them as the other options are really for those who used Windows Media Player and don't synchronize up right, something I found out the hard way!
The sound quality is very good - the very lowest bass isn't as good as my Minidisc but close lacking the bloatedness often found while the mids and high notes are very smooth on my Sennhesier HD201's driving them well.
If you told your player you lived in North America which I did you defeat that EU inspired obligatory limiter that getting decent sound levels into higher quality less sensitive headphones such as Sennhesier's difficult by cutting out when the voltage goes above a preset level.
Unfortunately the EU bureaucrats didn't understand how loud a pair of headphones go depends on their sensitivity and that varies.Grrr!!!
I find using it pretty intuitive.