shadowritten

If Sony drop ATRAC, then I'm sorry, but I'm off! Aside from the general good build quality of Sony equipment - and reasonable sound quality of their audio gear in particular - Sony would have little to offer a committed DAP fan like me if they trashed the one reason I choose their products: gapless playback thanks to ATRAC. Why else would I stay? With MP3s, there is a (albeit longwinded) workaround to achieve a kind of gapless effect. I'd be forced back to this route without ATRAC. Or, I'd look at investing in a Sony CD Walkman, or a non-Sony DVD/CD portable unit. In short, Sony walking away from ATRAC would just be a disaster. They should open up the format so it could be used universally. How thick are the executives at Sony not to realise the advantages this could bring? Let other firms' music management software encode to ATRAC, but keep it so that ATRAC only works on Sony devices! It's so simple - I wonder why they haven't implemented it ...

Damn it! .exe won't run! Getting this message: The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000135). Click on OK to terminate the application. Any ideas?

My only bug bear about this nifty program is that, once your MP3s are on the HD5, you can't play them back in the correct track order - even when properly tagged. Anyone know why?

Poor old Sony. 20-odd years at the summit of the portable audio world, then along comes that little white box. Now the firm is being punished for its complacency. Imagine if the HD1 had been the first DAP. People would've simply said, 'Seen Sony's new Walkman? What a great idea!' There wouldn't have been a word said about how it looked ... cos small and metallic is basically the Japanese look for electronic gadgets (and God, I love 'em!). But when Steve Jobs and Co. put a computer in a box designed by Fisher Price and ramped up the emotive marketing, bingo: they had a long-running success on their hands. It's important to note here that no one says, 'Isn't the iPod well built?'; or 'Doesn't the iPod sound amazing?'; or 'Isn't the iPod a technical marvel?' No, people just say it looks cool. And cool sells. Any wonder then why Sony are chasing the cool dollar (or pound, or euro, or yen)? They badly need to get back in the game; and to do it, they're having to whore themselves in an undignified way by pandering to a planet of morons who can't see past what's on the surface - a la, a large percentage of iPod owners. Once the iPod fad is over, and if Sony can ride out the storm, you'll see a return to the Sony build and design quality of old. For now though, it's all about the Benjamins ...

I get the sense that Sony are still sounding out the DAP market. They got seriously wrong-footed by Apple a few years back, then sat idly by while their crown was stolen. Now they're playing catch-up. So don't expect to see radical innovations of the kind we've enjoyed from Sony in the past until they've levelled the playing (player?) field somewhat. And this, sadly, includes enormous capacity HDDs - which I, like many, would seriously welcome.

Okay, so who has the PC know-how to track down said config file, always supposing it exists? Show me how to alter it and I'll run some tests.