C_player

Are you "sure" the artist is really the same? Empty spaces at the beginning or end of the artist field could cause the problem you are seeing. Also realize that there are TWO artist fields in the Connect Player: the track artist and the album artist. If these two don't match then you'll get two different artists. This allows you to have a compilation album that shows up as "Various" while keeping the artist for each track.

There's a pretty good percentage of us folks that CAN rip most non-enhanced CD's successfully in Connect Player, so it isn't a "dire" problem for everyone, obviously. In most cases I've seen, the people who can't see a CD drive have something that is messing with the CD drive installed on their system. This could be lame CD burning software, CD emulation software (stuff that makes ISO's show up like real drives), or other programs that "grab" the CD drive every time a disc is inserted. As others have mentioned, SonicStage is a good way to get around the issue of an unseen CD drive. If it can see the drive, you are golden, as you can rip ATRAC files that way. But if it can't see the CD drive either, there is some more digging you'll need to do on your system.

Other than GYM, found elsewhere on this site, I've not come across any 3rd party software that supports the Network Walkman products. Musicmatch, Real, Windows Media Player, Napster, Yahoo Music Engine, Rhapsody and others have the Walkman showing up as only a removable HDD (which it is) but they cannot write the proper format of music and other special files needed to make the Walkman work.

The answers to your questions are... 1. The only way to "reset" the rating to the automatic ratings that the Connect Player maintains is to remove the song from the library and then add it back in. It's a bummer, but it works. 2. Artist Link sends each track that it hasn't "seen" before to Gracenote, then waits for information to come back. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't (thanks Gracenote!) I've sat there with a network monitor and watched several connections go out to Gracenote, and then had nothing come back. That's what I know, so I hope it helps.

Not that you can, but can you post some details about the track that you are having problems with? I'm curious to see if I have something in my library like that, that doesn't work when you transfer the first time but works every time after that.

I will ask some folks I know about the possibility of beta testing, but I wouldn't get your hopes up. The Connect player software is a very complex software project, which makes fixing things remarkably non-straightforward. There's a reason why SonicStage hasn't gotten dramatically better over the past 5 years or so and it has nothing to do with people inside Sony wanting or not wanting to make it better.

Trust me, if the fixes could be out in a week, they would be. But the way software works in large companies is that it takes time to go through all the "proper channels" to get things fixed, tested, buttoned down and released. I can assure you that people working on the software know how much we all want the software fixed. Fixes will be coming, but we shouldn't expect miracles. That's what I know as of now.

The other option is that the song has something in the tags that is not compatible with what the Walkman can display. This happens on some odd characters that are non-standard. To test this, try to clear all the tags out of a song that won't transfer and see if it goes. If it does, you know what the problem is.

The Artist Link feature only works when the "correct" tag data is used. Guess where that tag data comes from? Gracenote. So, unfortunately, if you want Artist Link you also have to take some bad tags. This one isn't Sony's fault it looks like. In fact, if you've tried the Yahoo Music Engine it does the same stuff. I've turned off the feature in both apps and I tag things by hand.

I'm pretty sure this got fixed in the latest patch update. Go check the update site in your area for the most up-to-date version. At least on my version of the player it doesn't do that any more.

Let's see what you can do with drag & drop.... - Individual songs? Check. - Folders of songs? Check. - Album artwork onto the song info area? Check. - Playlists (m3u)? Check. You can drag these into (almost) any area of the player: - Into the library - Into the device - Into a playlist - Into the CD burn view - Into the now playing queue So, it looks like you can drag & drop a lot of stuff to a lot of places if you want to.

If you don't mind losing the ability to move purchased music from Mora (in Japan) and Connect Store (in Europe and the US), any advanced features like Artist Link, playlists, Top 100, etc., then I'm sure a hacked PSP manager would be fine. Oh, and you also lose $20, since the PSP manager isn't free. Then again, why not go use SonicStage or even the publicly built GYM? Neither cost you a thing, and they both have as many (or more) features than the PSP manager does.

I've heard that the enhanced CD and mixed mode CD fixes are at the top of the "to be fixed" list for the next few patches.

I regularly move my Walkman between two different PCs and have no problems at all. Unless you are trying to do something bad (re: illegal) with purchased music from an online music store, there should be no reason why you can't move the device to any PC you want and copy ripped OMAs, MP3s, WAVs, and WMAs to it all day long.

The device library may be corrupt if you removed a bunch of stuff, reinstalled, etc. You should make sure you've really cleaned the device out of the system, too. To do that, make sure the Connect player is not running, your device isn't attached to the PC, and do one of the following things: == Fix 1: Format the device == It isn't always fun, but sometimes your new Walkman gets into a funk, and no software in the world can fix it. If you keep seeing the "100%" or "97%" reading message in Connect player and can't ever get beyond it, formatting the device (called "Initializing" in the preferences menu) will fix it. This does remove all the content from your device, but you have it all on your PC to put back on, right? 1. Disconnect the device from the PC 2. Go to Preferences 3. Go to Initialize 4. Answer yes == Fix 2: Remove the device from the Connect Library == *** Warning - The following steps could seriously mess up your PC if you don't know what you are doing. The author takes no responsibility for what happens when you follow these directions *** 1. Run regedit 2. Find the following key: HKEY CUUURENT USER\Software\Sony Corporation\CONNECT Player\PDAppLogic\Profiles\ 3. Pick any keys found below (but inside of) the one listed above. Delete them. 4. Close regedit 5. Run Connect player 6. Attach your device After doing either of these steps, your device should show up again, and you should make it past 100%. Hopefully this gets you up and going. I've had to do both, and it just depends on what is busted to figure out which one to try.

That's odd, I've never seen it do that to my songs before. In any case, yes, you really should disable the artistlink feature in preferences to turn off these "behind the scenes" changes to your album names. I'll have to try some more tracks I have to see if it changes them, too.

Yes, things are slow right now. But fixes keep showing up about once a month or so. I think things are getting better little by little. I can tell you that once you get in the 3000 track range, it will be very slow. Somewhere around 3K is where the player goes from usable to "yawn" while you wait for it to load up and be useful. So staying below that track number (2K works OK) is advised.

The "full sync" option for devices does this, but the downside is it makes the transfer process increasingly slower and slower. You are better off doing the copying yourself right now until that feature gets fixed.

I'm pretty sure this is the same feature as SonicStage, where only licensed (protected) Atrac files can be "brought back" from a device if they don't already exist on the PC its hooked to.

You have to do a little more effort to make this work. 1. Follow all the steps above for every single track in an album. This part is important, because if there is some other artwork it might get "found" and used instead. 2. Remove all the songs for the album. I know, this sounds weird, but its necessary. 3. Do a directory import, scan, or file import on all the songs in the album you just removed. 4. When the songs pop back in, you should see the new artwork. I'm not quite sure, but I think the "album" highlight artwork belongs to the first song that shows up in the library with artwork in it. Unless you add only one song at a time, there is no way to predict which song that ends up being, so that's why all the songs need to have the same artwork.

To be clear: the Walkman cannot and will not accept playlists from any application (yet) but Connect Player. So, if you want to use playlists made by other applications (like Winamp or Musicmatch) you must first "import" those M3U lists into the Connect Player. Once this happens, they will show up as playlists in the upper left-hand side of the app. You can edit, rename, and drop these new playlists onto your device. I've done this several times so I know it works.

Can you give an example of where you saw the player change something that you edited? Did you disable the ArtistLink feature of the player?

If you have M3U's laying around the hard drive, telling Connect player to import them using the directory import function should work fine. I've done it several times using Winamp to create playlists.

It's worth noting that WMP does not put album artwork into the song files, but puts it into the same directory as the songs that are ripped. So it will still be some work to fix the artwork after importing a CD.

The feature you want is already in there! Go check out the following: In the player, go to Tools, Preferences, Views, All Tracks, then enable the check mark next to Date Imported. Close that preferences box and you can now find the date imported on the far right side of the library view. You now have a free feature