I was doing a bit of admin and paperwork today (it's tax return time) and I came across an invoice for some stuff I bought from Adaptec last year. Until now it has not clicked given all the discussion on the General forum on Digital River's appalling performance on behalf of S-B for the car player. However, read on...

I ordered (last year, around July 2000) a copy of E-Z SCSI 5 and the manual for it. According to the invoice, I paid $80 for the software (which I downloaded) and $15 for the paper manual. At the time, I remember being given a list of postal options, and I chose the cheapest, US Mail Priority. In spite of my choice, it actually cost me $54 for postage and it was sent priority courier. Reading the invoice it quite clearly states $6.50 for priority post, yet it still got sent courier, and I got hit for $54 from my credit card. There was no way to call (it had a US-only 800 number, and there is - believe it or not - no address for D-R on the return label!).

Just to really top the story off, what I actually received was Dart Pro 32 software, something I had been intending to buy around that time, which I use to record and clean up my vinyl recordings onto hard disk so I can make CDs (bad ones, I know) and rip them for the empeg. There is a happy ending: the value of Dart Pro 32 at that time was something around $200, so I think I got it reasonably cheap at less than half price. Stuff you, D-R!

So I suspect that this has been going on for a lot longer than just around the time of the Rio online store being brought together; it is notable that Adaptec only used them for around six months and then dropped them in favour of their own commercial e-sales venture, Roxio (which moron thought that one up?).

Shame S-B didn't notice before signing them up and effectively ending sales of the car player. Maybe we'd be looking at the Mk3 player by now