Upgrading RCA Pearl TH1611 Firmware for AAC

Sometimes the best technology gadgets are not the most expensive, take the RCA Pearl TH1611.  It is a little MP3 player that runs on a single triple aaa battery.  It gets hours and hours of play. Much to the surprise of most people RCA actually came out with the first MP3 player, which I owned way back in the dark ages before iPods.  It was the Lyra and with a really large card it could hold a whopping 48 megabytes of music.

This little Pearl, which is about a tenth the size holds a gigabyte and plays for about a work week of time (about 40 hours give or take based on my experience).  In fact it plays for hours after the battery monitor shows that the thing should be dead.

Firmware update needed to listen to AAC files

Way back when I got it, there was something on the box that said I would need a firmware upgrade.  The device worked for everything I needed it for at the time, mostly Audible books and some music for running.  I never got around to it.

Then a couple weeks back I was trying to listen to an audio book a friend gave me with an AAC file extension.  I think it was DRM free as opposed to the DRM not free type.

So today I’m finally getting around to a firmware upgrade from 3.001.005 to 3.1.5.5-ish.

After all this time it wasn’t very easy to track down the download of the firmware.  That might have stalled me when I bought the thing actually.

I mistakenly followed the RCA support links here and here both trying to get me to download some easy rip software that I don’t really need. Sure its free, but who needs more software clogging up their pc?

Finally after walking through the process to contact RCA support, I came across their last bastion of defense against phone calls, a FAQ that mentioned

TH1611 downloads

Where can I get downloads for my TH1611?

To update the firmware of the TH1611 mp3 player  click here

To update the firmware of the TH1611 mp3 player to enable DRM free AAC playback click here.

To download the latest version of EasyRip Media^TM Software  click here.

As John Lovitz used to say in the 80’s, “That’s the ticket!” 

So I followed that link to the download page where I could actually download the firmware.  It doesn’t really make sense to me why they don’t update their product pages or support update pages with this information and save themselves the trouble of FAQ page updates or even phone calls, but I finally did find it (by luck and because it was early in the day and I was paying more attention, if this had been a middle of the night upgrade, I’d be on hold by now).

Couple tips about upgrade

• I had to re-run the firmware upgrade software 3 times before I actually saw the infamous start button become clickable. 
• This upgrade did threaten and probably will erase all of my device data including music and books, so I’ll need to upload those again.
• I have no idea if this will enable my player to work better with Audible Manager which is one of the buggiest programs I’ve ever seen, but I’m hopeful.  (OK that’s an exaggeration but it is buggy as hell and has been for the last 10-12 years)

Post Upgrade Issues

Note, even after I ran this upgrade, my AAC files still would not play, got the same message. 

So then I went back up and looked at the links again.  I noticed that I had clicked on the link to download the firmware that enabled AAC but not the firmware upgrade.  The file names are very very similar.  So this time I went back and uploaded the firmware. (click here)

This may all be a waste of time trying this again, because when I get to the firmware upgrade section it shows that I’m basically already upgraded. 

Note this time I tried to run the upgrade without formatting the data area.  It wouldn’t let me and in fact automatically checked the format data area and deleted everything without me really being able to stop it.  So be warned, if you hit Start it will zap everything on your player!  (sorry that warning is so far down in this article)

Differences

This time when the upgrade ran, it really deleted EVERYTHING on the player, didn’t leave any folders or anything like it did last time.  (First time it deleted files but left some of the folder structure).

Similarities

It still didn’t allow me to play DRM free AAC on my Pearl

After thoughts & Shortcuts

About halfway through this whole process, I was determined to figure out if it was even possible to turn on the AAC DRM free playback option.  I suspected that it wasn’t, so I also opted for the low tech solution.  I loaded up Sound Taxi (free trial download if you are interested and tired of fooling around too) and simply started converting the stupid DRM free AAC file to MP3 so I could load it on my device!  Note. I bought and use SoundTaxi Professional which supposedly runs faster (I don’t think so) but DOES allow you to convert more than 1 file at a time.

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