p0rkch0p2007

no firmware = no more money from me . im sorry but sont HAD to know that they were gonna pull this trick well before it happened. the a808 is only a few months old and sony have stitched up a lot of people, i understand some people are happy using sonicstage but for the people who wanted the drag and drop they should have released the firmware if only for the a808 series and nothing else. although i suppose they get out of this by saying that sonicstage will be kept up to date with new releases, so in a sense they have a get out clause because it isnt like they have completely abandoned ss and made the player completely unusable. (however it will be interesting imo if sonicstage EVER receives an update, my money says that it wont)

now that the new players are coming out, what software will you all be using? the standard windows media player, or something else like mediamonkey. i have thought about this for a while now and am still not sure. the problem is i want to have my entire collection in lossless on my computer and then be able to convert the audio to a lower bitrate to put on my player. windows media player will allow me to do this but only convert wma lossless to wma, not to mp3 or something else. mediamonkey is good if i want my music lossless (flac) i can then convert to anything to put on my player, but there is no gapless with it, (also windows media player is now sony's "standard" software). i just wondered what eveybody's thoughts were on this matter and which software you will be using Edit: the other thing to keep in mind is that if (and it's a big if) sony do release a firmware update to make the player gapless i think it's much more likely for them to enable it for mp3 or aac not wma.

the reason for this price drop may well be because there is no firmware update coming (supposedly). fantastic price compared to the ipod ranges (when u consider the sound quality of the ipods), after what i said in the other post about not buying sony again if they dont release a f/w update, this may have just changed my mind . nice one sony

thats true, i bet it would be for japan only. i wouldnt have thought you could use it elsewhere, if it is for japan only then they may well remove all the other languages from the software.

yeah they have the same thing on the sony uk site. that is what makes me think that they wont be releasing an update. maybe i'm wrong but it does seem strange that they are advertising them as separate players (like offering you a choice, an atrac player or an open player). time will tell on this one im afraid.

what the hell is going on with sony!!! does anyone no what on earth is going on at that company anymore???? i understand its the ireland branch and not from sony us or japan but u wud think that they would all no what was going on as he said it takes months for players to be designed before they are produced so surely sony knew when they released the a808's that the new players were in the pipeline!!! if it is true that we are not gonna get a firmware update then sony can kiss my a$$, and i will get another dap from someone else. i think you are gonna find people will be fed differing stories from all sony branches until there is some sort of official statement, so i will hang on and wait and see.

IMO this failing absolutely sucks, i understand that sony might only be concerned with people who want to fill up a player with random tracks (hence the small memory on the players i believe), but surely sony MUST release a firmware update so they can enable gapless playback, i have many albums that are gapless and not even live and when i first went looking at daps this was one major feature i looked out for, and ended up settling on the nwhd3. and i have continued to go sony because of 2 things 1. sound quality, and 2. gapless playback.

i am actually hoping that there will be a firmware update rather than me having to go and buy a new walkman considering i have only had this one a couple of months! it is surely going to do sony's rep no good whatsoever if they dont release one so it in their interests as much as ours

Well... after some careful thought this past week i have decided to stay with sony lol! i think i was just over excited after watching the unveiling of the new ipods last week. After reading some reviews on the net about the new ipod's they dont really seem to have been changed all that much. (and no suprise that every review i have read fails to mention absolutely anything about sound quality). i will either stick with my a806 if a firmware update does end up being released, or i will buy the new 8gig player, and use mediamonkey to manage my music library. all in all i suppose it was the whole sound quality issue that prevented me from dropping sony (as it has done so many times before now). It's really difficult to drop amazing sound quality for a more flexible option with worse sound quality. the only thing which i did prefer on the ipods were the size of the classic hard drives (80 and 160 gig). i guess i'm just one of those people who prefers to carry his entire music library around with him rather than just a few tracks off each album. anyway come on sony and release a firmware update for my a806!!!! and then maybe one that will allow gapless playback (or is that just wishfull thinking)

i never meant sony's time is up as a walkman maker, i meant my time as a frustrated customer of theirs is up. and im quite entitled to put a post up about an ipod in this forum, its my view and i have expressed it, and i think a few ppl would appreciate the post. hey i just told it like it is, everything in the post is true. if you dont think an ipod post would be welcome in this forum why read it? and better yet why reply to it?

well im finally gonna ditch sony alltogether now. finding out that the new sony daps arent able to play back music gaplessly was a real kick in the teeth for me as i own a lot of gapless albums. and now the new ipods have been unvieled im definitly going for one of them! 160 gig hd on the classic ipod 40 hours battery life, cover flow on the display, I LOVE IT! not too sure about the touch screen ipod though. it seems to be moving away from what an ipod is all about, (music). who wants an internet browser on their mp3 player anyway? with most mobile phones being able to do this nowadays i feel that this feature is a little wasted. anyway im ditching my sony daps and joining the ipod brand. its a shame because sony always seem to be 5 steps behind apple, when if they REALLY LISTENED to their customers and what they want they could be the number one brand.

well.... will a firmware update for the new players be able to allow gapless playback, or would it need to be done in another way? if it is only a firmware update why not put a petition on here like the other guy did for the older players?

now that sony walkmans are "open" do you think we will be able to use mediamonkey or itunes to transfer our music to the player. i'm more interested in mediamonkey than itunes but just wondered

i presume if this new player is plays for sure compatible that it won't support atrac? maybe it will support wmp and ss, although i doubt it. which also raises another question, if it is only supported by wmp and wont be atrac compatible then bang goes gapless playback? it's not a major issue to me but id be a little gutted if this were to be the case. does any1 think it is worth me ripping my cd collection using wmp yet, or i s that just me being a little eager to live life without sonicstage

I respect what you're saying but i've got better things to be doing with my time than struggling and fighting with mediocre software.

i have to say the only faults i could find with my ipod was 1. battery life, this is pretty poor and 2. sound quality, also pretty poor. if i could have an ipod with sony battery life and sound quality i believe you would have the perfect mp3 player. the only other factor is the size of the unit itself which i think could be smaller, although this isn't a major problem. i suppose the perfect size would be to have the capacity of the video players in the nano case and drop the video capability as the screen would be way to small thus rendering the video function useless. a note on the click wheel, i think it's a brilliant innovation. it manages to incorporate quite a few functions into one control. the only problem i do have with it is that it's not very accurate when it comes to fast forwarding/rewinding a track, changing the volume. i know you can change the sensitivity of the click-wheel in the settings but i never managed to find a happy medium with it. lets be honest apple are not concerned by either of these factors because ppl are still buying them like there's no tomorrow, so i highly doubt that we will ever come across this player. i am left praying that sony sort out ss and allow us to use other software to sync our music to our players!!!

excellent!!! thankyou to everyone who helped with this problem. just a query, now that ive changed the drive letter to F will it stay as F permanently or do i have to change it in disk management everytime the letter changes?

ok ive made sure that the drive is the same letter that it is when the files were imprted and the album art is back!!! richyu can you tell me how to access this disk management snap, im currently running vista. cheers 4 everyones help on this problem

ive tried that and still no album art. the strange thing is that the actual music file itself is still accessible by ss. the music still plays but the album art has gone. however i have now noticed that album art has reaapeared when i go into each album. so when i am on the screen in ss that shows all my albums/playlists the album art is not displayed, yet when i click on the album i want to play, and all the tracks in that album are displayed the album art is there!

dont get me wrong i like the sound quality too! the only other way is if i use media monkey to import my albums as mp3 files and have that embed the artwork into the file itself. the only thing is that i will miss out on gapless playback which is a bit of a pain in the arse as most of my albums have gapless parts in them. oh well it looks like its ipod's crappy sound quality with gapless Vs. sony's supremely sounding a800 without gapless! i think i'll go with the a800

nope. no good its exactly the same as it was before. i could always just remove and add the artwork again but im not prepared to do that eveytime ss feels like being silly, especially with the amount of albums i have on ss. i think apple is gonna get a returning customer in the next few days, i cannot put up with sony or ss and their stupidity any longer

ok i'll give it a try and let u know how i get on. fingers crossed!

i ripped all my cds directly to the externel hard drive. i didnt rip them to my computers hard drive and then move them to my externel hard drive, if thats what you mean. and no i haven't deleted the fringe folder. its still located on the external drive with all the album art inside it, which makes this problem even more confusing. if it had deleted it out of the fringe folder i could understand why ss has stopped displaying it but its still in there!

hi ive spent the last 2 weeks ripping my entire cd library to ss4.3. The tracks are encoded in atrac3plus 256. i manually scan album art in as i think the quality of the cddb's is complete shit . anyway i have all my tracks and all my art stored on my externel hard drive, everything has been fine for about 3 days but i went to play sum tracks in ss today and all my album art has disappeared into thin air. the art is still on the hard drive but ss has just removed it all!!!! what the hell is going on??? im seriously considering getting a different mp3 player after this because i've had it to the back teeth with ss and its stupid errors and problematic performance, after using it for about 5 years my patience with it (and sony for that fact) is wearing extremely thin! can anyone suggest what might be wrong??? Cheers

hallellujah!!!!!! i seriously thought i was going to have to sell this player. now thanks to sony's firmware update i dont have to. BRAVO . i am soo happy with this player now. the only thing that was wrong with it was the eq setting delivering unwanted noise, but now that is a thing of the past. this is by far the best player on the market today!!!!