AlanL

I can confirm that the 6-band EQ works with MP3 files already.

I didn't realise until the NW-A3000 arrived that the Connect software does not install on Windows ME. There is no mention of this on the Sony site or on Amazon. I'm using SonicStage 3.3 to transfer albums onto the player (mostly existing MP3s). This generally works OK, but when transferring certain albums, the transfer seems to hang on a particular track. The only way out of it is to switch off the PC and disconnect the A3000, which can leave orphaned tracks on the player that the library does not know about, but these can be identified and manually deleted in Windows Explorer after restarting. The hanging problem seems to have nothing to do with the amount being transferred, since the same albums fail at the same point every time. It's happened with MP3 and Atrac files. Does anybody know what might be causing the hanging? I've tried connecting the A3000 directly to the PC instead of via a hub, but the same problem occurs. I can get round it by re-ripping or transcoding the problem albums, but at this rate it will take me a long time to transfer my 300+ albums.

Having spent an inordinately long time researching the various options on DAPs, I have finally made a decision and ordered the A3000 from Amazon, which should arrive in about a week. My situation is currently this: I have about 300 albums in MP3 128kbps format which take up about 13Gb. About 100 of those albums were sourced from line-in, and divided manually, taking care to leave together tracks where a gap would be detrimental. The remaining 200 were ripped from CDs (and are all gapped). Having studied the A3000 manual carefully, it appears that unlike the HD5, there is no restriction on using the EQ settings with MP3 files. Plus, there seems to be no difference in battery life between playing 128k MP3 and 128K Atrac. So, apart from about 50 CDs which would benefit from gaplessness by being ripped to Atrac 128K, the rest can be loaded directly as MP3s to the A3000. Will the CONNECT software (either with or without the upgrade) be usable for ripping about 50 CDs and transferring about 250 albums' worth of MP3s, or should I not bother with CONNECT? I have recently installed SonicStage 3.3 and seem to have it working reasonably well. If I use SS and MP3 File Manager to load the A3000, what features will I be missing out on? And if the CONNECT software is upgraded to a reasonable version in a few months, would I have to initialise the disk on the A3000 before using CONNECT and reload everything?