Akai Kenshi

Gapless playback is still a no-go. That's something that requires a firmware update I bet. It uses Apple encoders for AAC...might make it better than Nero for encoding, I'll have to do a side-by-side comparison later. No ability to edit tags, which is lame, but I did notice that MP3 files transfered through it would display the year on my walkman while MP3's transfered through drag and drop would not. Other than that, there isn't much to recommend this program over others. I'll look into upgrading to pro and play around with it more later.

Yes, I use that program all of the time.

So, my NWZ-A818, which I love, seems to be having some trouble displaying the song's release year in MP3 tags. For AAC, which is the majority of my collection, the year on the tag is displayed just fine, but for MP3's it displays "unknown" even if there is a year entered in the tag. I tried entering "YEAR: ****" in the comment field of the tag but that didn't work either. Any ideas?

I wonder how good the MP3 and AAC encoders are.

Juice

Hmm, I just tried creating a .m3u playlist with foobar2000 and drag-and-dropping it over, and it gave me a confirmation window saying it could transport the file but not use it. My walkman is still charging, so I haven't actually tried to play the playlist yet, but I'm fairly positive it won't work. The manual was no help here either. I guess we'll have to wait for Media Manager.

So you can hook it up to a stereo and not have to turn the player's volume all the way up to get a decent signal? Cool! That's a feature I've been missing from the walkman for a while.

Oops, I must have missed the bit about Ubuntu somehow. Cool! As for the docking stations, I saw the SonyStyle page, but the specs page seemed rather scant. I should have been more specific with my question. I gather that the dock must have USB and AC adapter connections, and it sounds like it has a stereo mini-plug input. It says you can output to external speakers, does that mean an RCA or stereo mini-plug output with a signal optimized for an external amplifier? *gets excited* Probably a pointless question to ask though, as the item isn't in stock at SonyStyle yet and probably nobody has one.

Has anyone tried using the walkman with OSX or Linux? Also, the little docks that they're selling, what exactly do they do and are they worth buying?

Even the slim PSP would be a tight fit in my pocket, the battery life is lacking, and I'm not interested in portable gaming. Now if Sony released a new Mylo that had the same features as my Nokia N800 internet tablet, I'd probably buy it, but it still wouldn't replace my A818 because of the form factor and battery life.

Right now I use a combo of Nero Burning ROM and Mp3tag. I'll check out this Media Manager thing when it comes out.

And maybe hell will freeze over as well...

It's...quite noticeable.

Sony Walkmen could only do gapless either with ATRAC files or (in the case of the S7** series) SonicStage-encoded AAC files (which were of dodgy quality). The new Walkmen use neither of those things, and in my experience with drag-and-dropped Nero AAC files, they do not play gaplessly. A tad annoying, but not a dealbreaker for me. I'm hoping that new firmware or use of Sony Media Manager (with its possibly special tags or databases or whatever) can fix this. But yeah, I think I'll start voicing my concerns to Sony Customer Care about it.

Mine just arrived in the mail today. Awesome little player, my experience mostly echoes that of aznbro. I copied over some Nero-encoded AAC files, and they indeed do not play gaplessly. A minor annoyance, but hopefully it can be rectified. We'll see what develops with the Sony Media Manager software. There are a bunch of sound enhancement setting that I have yet to toy with. EDIT: And SonyStyle just sent me an e-mail saying they'd credit me the difference for the yesterday's price drop, without me even having to ask them! w00t!

No, it really doesn't. I'm probably in a minority opinion on this board, but I always thought that ATRAC 64 sounded like garbage.

Built in NC is kinda cool, but I think I'll just stick to the NC-60 headphones I forked over 19,500 yen for at Yodobashi.

Did you buy it through the SonyStyle website?

What?! The one I ordered last week hasn't even arrived yet, and they're already cutting the price? I know you pay a premium to be an early adopter, but Jesus Christ.

The industry as a whole seems to be moving away from hard-disks. Flash is getting cheaper, it's less fragile and power hungry, and the demand for DAPs higher than 4 GB in capacity is not that great anyway.

It can, but last time I tried it, it gave me a warning saying it didn't recognize the file type but could try to play it anyway, and it couldn't display the tags for the ATRAC files. Is this not your experience?

Do you work for Apple Marketing or something? You're starting to get really annoying.

The Playstation line sure seems to get regular firmware updates. But the Walkman line? No, not really.

Does that somehow not involve pre-caching and keeping a constant audio stream? I know that gaps are inherent in some formats, non-LAME mp3's for example would be encoded with a bit of silence at the beginning. EDIT: Okay, I see what you're saying, the player also has to be able to read those tags that specify the exact length of the track in order to be able to cough up the next one immediately. So, why can the S7** series play only SonicStage-encoded AAC files (the quality of which I wasn't particularly impressed by, ATRAC sounded better at the same bitrate) gaplessly, but not others? Something to do with some database that SS creates for them?

From what I understand, LAME encoded MP3s and iTunes and Nero AAC files are capable of being played back gaplessly. Its just a matter of the player pre-caching the next track and keeping the audio stream open during the transition, instead of closing the stream to load the next track then opening it back up again, causing a gap. This would be contingent on the firmware programing.