The worlds of music, photography and movies are rapidly converging with the world of PCs. That's good, for now we can rip, burn, edit, dub, and touch up on our own. Digital devices for music, cameras and camcorders are sure to be on the shopping list this holiday season.

However, there's a bad side. Computers and software are still buggy, and as you start to connect more devices the possibilities of incompatibilities increase as well. At one time, your biggest compatibility worry in music was whether you had one of those plastic disks that would let a 45 rpm record fit over the 33 rpm spindle.(If you don't know what that means — ask your parents.) It's not so easy now. For instance, The BugBlog was going to ask Santa for an Apple iPod for Christmas, until it was discovered there are update problems if Windows isn't on your C: drive.

A special Entertainment edition of the BugBlog lists some of the potential problems, and in many cases the fix as well. The following bug, incompatibility and problem reports have either been pulled out of the BugBlog archives or written new for this special report. They are arranged by company, and then by product. For example:

Apple says that their iTunes Music Store is sensitive to the permissions that are set on the Itunes Music folder on your computer. If you see an error message with a cryptic
-5000
error message, you may have to change the permissions, or the permissions on a subfolder. For more details on how to do this, see http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n93069.

Creative NOMAD Jukebox Zen USB 2.0
If you have a Creative NOMAD Jukebox Zen USB 2.0, and the player locks up after doing a USB charge, then get the version 1.11.01 firmware update.

Microsoft Windows Media Player 9
If you are using Microsoft Windows Media Player 9 for Windows XP to view a DVD, using subtitles, the subtitles may become disabled if you put the computer into Suspend or Hibernate mode. When you resume, and go back to the DVD, the subtitles will be gone. However, you can just go back to the Play Menu, Captions and Subtitles, and turn the Closed Captions back on.

You can read more about problems with Apple, Creative, Dell, Microsoft, Musicmatch, and RealNetworks products here.