Nintendolts

Tonight's blip is representative of what I've wasted most of my time on tonight. Needless technical fiddling in my humble opinion. Let me explain...

The boy has a Nintendo DSi. These cool little gadgets take an SD card, which allows you to capture pictures, sound etc. It also allows you to play music loaded onto it. So, not unreasonably, he asked if I could load some of his tunes on it.

"No problem!", says, and thought, I.
Thinking, of course, just copy some MP3s onto the SD and Bob's your mother's brother.

This did not work, the DSi couldn't even see the files, never mind play them.
Neither I, nor my offspring were impressed.

After a bit of a search, it turns out that Nintendo, for some crazy, perhaps insane reason, have decided to allow only AAC files to play on their kit. Whit?
So I had to work out how to convert his MP3s to AAC's, which turn out bizarrely to have .M4A suffixes. At this point, I'm wondering if I'm beginning to lose my mind.

Anyhoo - it's working now.

I can only imagine the conversation in the Japanese design studio...

Manager: This new DSi; we'll let it play music, people will love that.
Engineer: What formats will we support?
Manager: AAC, definitely AAC.
Engineer: But the most popular format is MP3. Everyone does MP3, that would be better.
Manager: Shut up, I'm the boss. Make it so, Yamamoto-san.