mgillespie

My impressions of the Euro store are not very good either. 1/ I had a free music download with my NW-A3000, but none of the music I wanted was available to purchase. 2/ I could not even register, the link just did nothing. 3/ Slow and unresponsive. Sometimes you are waiting for 30+ seconds for something to happen. This is on a 2MB ADSL connection, so it's a Connect issue, not a connection issue! If Sony want to get into Electronic music distribution, and be a serious competitor to iTunes and iPod, then they have to do something SERIOUSLY better than that buggy Connect and NW-A series units..

Cannot use either. Curently my A3000 is a pretty brick. Sonicstage misses out required functionality Connect is virtually useless, it crashes all the time, very slow, and unintuitive.

Using Connect to transfer all my music. I cannot get Play History to work I cannot get Artist Link to work I cannot Favoirte Shuffle to work.

Compared to the bugs in the Connect, the A3000 firmware is quite bug free, or so it seems. However, today I have been playing quite a few tracks on the unit, and rating some of them 4* and 5* However, if I now go into "Recently Played", it shows only 2 of the tracks I played today, instead of the 50 or so.. My Favorite 100, also shows the 2 same tracks, none of the other stuff I have been listening to. Is this a bug? Anyone else seen this behaviour???

I have never seen ArtistLink working. HAS ANYONE?? if so, what on earth did you do to make it work?

I can see a single "flat file" list, but it's starting to get very long. I want a tree view. Is this what you mean?

I have been in contact with Sony today by email, and pointed them (initially) to my Blog, which details my problems. After they suggested that installing the latest version on Connect would fix the "minor problems"!!! I informed them that I was already running the update, and that there were masses upon masses of people all suffering similar problems, I pointed them to the "Gen Kanai" weblog. I have not heard back yet. I asked them for a ETA of new software, or the possibility of beta testing, (current software is pre-Alpha quality...).

At the moment, my NW-A3000 has quite a few songs on it, but I can only view them in 1 very long list. Is there a way to get the Artist/Album/Track hirachy that the Library view has, for the Device track list? I tried all sorts, and can't get it. I can't believe it simply does not do it... (well actually, I can believe it, after seeing the state of the rest of the alpha Connect software).

Well, it's not quite as simple as my original post. I cannot drag and drop more than 1 tree of files. I also cannot drop a root directory, as they screws up the scan. I wonder if Sony did ANY testing of Connect before shipping it? Time for a long night of importing data, artist by artist. GGRRRR, If I meet those Sony Connect programmers down a dark alley, I will not be responsible for my actions....

I set Connect to convert my WMA and MP3 to ATRAC3PLUS, at 128K, I cannot determine if it's done this OK, as on the player it says ATRAC @ 128 in the Track Detailed Information. Is there any way of telling if these files are being converted to PLUS rather than normal? Am I correct in thinking for the same bitrate, ATRAC3PLUS gives smaller files, so therefore a better choice, or is it not as simple as that??

Well here are my results from trying to import from either a network driver letter, or UNC path: 1/ Import Directory(Ctrl +D) - does not ungrey the OK button, so no go. 2/ Import Files (Ctrl+I) - Allows files to be selected, but when trying to import, they say "Skipped... xxxxx" 3/ Watch Directory - allows folders to be selected, but when trying to import, they say "Skipped xxxxx" 4/ Dropping network folders onto Library - Works!!! So there is no consistancy here at all. I have used method 4, and it seems to be working, so there is no reason why 1 -3 should not work. Is there any way of reporting bugs in Connect to Sony? Looked on their support site, and there are a few feeble FAQ's and the downloads, no email support or anything like that. No wonder the software is so bad, when users cannot feed back problems...

Well the software does not work at all for me. I have wasted an evening so far, trying to import my music. Nowhere in the Connect documentation, does it mention that you cannot import music from a network drive share. Does it work? Does it hell, the OK button is greyed out. Totally useless, as all my music is on a remote LAN pc. The more I use connect, the more frustrated I am getting. I keep thinking back, "if I bought an ipod, it would be working by now...."

The specs for my NW-A3000 say it supports WMA, MP3 and ATRAC, this is good, as my music collection is WMA and MP3, from my old Creative Jukebox 3. However, I cannot seem to copy these file types to the device, the Connect software wants to transcode them to OMG format!! Surely Sony cannot claim a hardware device to support a format, when all they do is convert that format in software to work with their ATRAC format (I assume this is what OMG files are..) Am I missing something obvious? I was planning on not converting all my music to ANOTHER music format....

Wanted something other than the "follow the crowd" iPod, so picked up a A3000 today in purple from Argos (£10 off, and 10% discount makes £169). As always, Sony hardware is awesome, and likewise, Sony software is utter shite. The Connect software, even after updating is REALLY bad. To make matters worse, you are forced into using it, (or Sonic Stage, almost as bad, and reduced functionality). Unless Sony buck their software development up, they will never crack the iPods dominance... I am toying with the idea of taking the player back, as the software is so bad. It's a shame with such tasty hardware, but being locked into Connect, is seriously bad news. Any potential purchasers, beware... (have CC'd Sony on this, not that that care particularly...)