ceres

Wow, this is a massive downer for all French buyers. Next time order from mp3-player.de. They offer competitive prices and shipping is not too expensive to France.

/quote] I had the A829 for a while. Whilst I found WMP ok, I must admit that I prefer SS. This could be down to being more familar with SS. I too found that WMP highest setting was 192 KBP. Is there no way of increasing this?

I brought WMP into play because by and large it does a better job of not losing tag information, especially year and album art, than Explorer.exe You cannot add album art to WAV files because the format simply doesn´t allow for album art afaik. You´ll have to convert first.

Well, I don´t like the 829´s sound signature either. It´s certainly more processed than the 818s which isn´t exactly neutral either. The new 829 is in my opinion unusable with darker, more powerful IEMS such as Shure Se530, UM2 and such. You really need something like TF 10s or other very neutral phones. Problem is TF 10s hiss too much with the 829; in fact just as much as on the 818. I figured Sony would improve on the hiss performance but apparently didn´t bother to. As it stands the 829 is an overpriced (where I live) hybrid of the S7 and A8 series inheriting deficiencies such as Album Art not showing up on roughly 10% of all cases despite proper tags. Playlisting does work in Winamp but due to still crappy transfer speeds (insulting) the programm crashes often while updating the player. (Smart)Playlisting has become vital for me and as such I rely on ratings which Sony has removed from its recent offerings. Why? The same holds true for OTG playlists. Why are those gone? Creative, Cowon and such still got them. For encoding purposes I would get dbpoweramp in conjunction with the lame codec for mp3 and the aac plugin from nero. You can create >300kbit/s encodings but imho there is no benefit in going past 200 kbit/s. In order to properly tag and embed cover art go for mp3tag. You can import the results into wmp and take it from there. Really, I am far from impressed with Sony´s efforts the last past 6 months. In fact I am reluctant to call it an effort at all as all shortcomings of the NWZ8xx were duplicated and crammed into the shell of the A9 Player MINUS the TV function. IMO, Sony needs to drop the Price by as much as 33-50% to make people buy this player. Even then biggest buying incentive would probably be the included In-Ears which are very good for pack-ins. If one was to get a NANO these days, I wouldn´t want to call it "settling" as many functions work flawlessly and you get great managment software with iTunes and a lot more. The rolled-off bass is not that bad with SE530s or the likes. Sure there is no (real) EQ but in return you get very little hiss even with very sensitive IEMs. The Clickwheel is braindead and imprecise but when used with the radio remote you can cope just fine.

Transfer speed using Vistas Explorer or OS X Finder is about 1/3 of Nano3g and 1/4 of Cowon D2. It´s embarrassing, really.

I have a question for those of you own both the new 820 and "old" 810. Does Sony employ the same slow Flash memory in the new models or did transfer speeds (finally) improve?

Same here with a unit bought in Germany.

Sony´s states on its German site under tech specs that aluminum is used for the 820´s shell. The same hold true for the 810 series. However, the 820 seems cheaper as little gimmicks such as the shutter for the wm port were removed to save 2 cents per unit. Bearing in mind that Sony goes head to head with the touch in pricing it´s a more than daring proposition Sony is making these days.

If you select playback range - All and set the device to shuffle you should be able to get a shuffle by Album. I am to lazy to get the 818 out of my gym bag.

While the NWZ does in deed default to MTP, this behaviour can be stopped using Window´s control panel. All you need to do is point Windows to a new driver under device manager. Pick generic UMS and you are all set. Regards, ceres

I will surely forgo the NWZ 829 model as it is too expensive and doesn´t fix the missing otg playlisting and ratings features. Featurewise it´s a logical evolution but nothing that exudes real engineering skill. Too lame to warrant a buy. I hope Apple release a 16 gig nano this September with the Classic´s sound chip plus better, faster controls. I don´t see Sony gathering enough momentum lately. The 818 was a right move but why not ready such a move every 6-9 months?

Funny thing is Atrac 3Plus from the days of SS 3.3 pretty much tied AAC (itunes 7.5) in a recent listening test at soundexpert so with a bit of tuning it could have been the best (obviously). http://www.soundexpert.info/coders256.jsp

Can you please make a screenshot of the resulting files? If you install the explorer extension of poweramp and then hover over the created files you should be able to see if the tags are incomplete or the file ending is off.

For the US http://crave.cnet.com/8301-1_105-9878636-1.html

Hey man, I also use dbpoweramp when ripping securely under windows. Make sure not to encode to raw aac. You can specify .mp4 ending in your encoding preferences.