Hi all I`m looking to buy a NWZ-a818, but have a few queries that I would like to clear up before I go ahead with a purchase As I do not run windows the option to use WMP is not there, so five main questions have arisen that the sony style store people were unable to assist me with: *Album art - I gather from the net and these forums that embedded album art will display. That is good, but two further issues may arise that I would like clarified by anyone in the know: - Does the size of the album art matter? I have some covers that are over 500x500 pixels and I know some players cannot display large images (over 200x200) - is this a problem? - Does the album art need to be embedded in every song in an album for it to be displayed (ie: if the first song on the album has embedded art, will the player be smart enough to apply it to the rest of the album?) * When I am finished copying music across from Finder, am I right in saying that the player will update the database with the new songs so they will all be searchable via their ID3 tags? * Playlists - how would I create these without WMP? * Real world battery life - greater, equal or less than the stated 33 hours? Any info on these matters would be greatly appreciated. Thanks very much Update: I went ahead and bought the NWZ-A818 and here are my findings under OSX Leopard 10.5.1: *Drag and drop works perfectly, no problems at all. The only minor hitch i noticed was that if I dragged a a song into the player that already existed then it would not over-write it (a pain when updating album art), but besides that, no issues. *Album art SIZE does not seems to matter at all, I have some album art smaller than 300x300 and some MUCH larger, in the order of over 1000x1000 which work fine, though the player takes a fraction longer to display the art (but the song starts playing just as quickly as any other) *Album art must be Baseline ("Standard") as photoshop describes it and not Progressive. I did not test Baseline Optimized. Progressively encoded jpegs (and PNG images) will not be displayed by the player. *After every sync with the computer the database is rebuilt and all songs added are indexed into the database. *As already mentioned, no playlists are possible, but I havn't looked into it. *Images work fine, I havn't checked the resolution limits, but a bunch of ~600x800 images show up fine. Most do not have thumbnails, so they are not built by the player - I am assuming only those with embedded thumbnails will correctly show up... *For video: Using iSquint (built for ipods, but works) using the H.264 encoding works great SO pretty successful overall Things I really like about this player: *Sounds great - I`ve only just noticed that some of my music is of poor quality... *Pops up new song when it changes (my Clix did not have this), very useful *Browsing for Music is much easier than on my Clix or girlfriends Nano *Size and looks Things that could be better: *Nicer menu fonts, which could be a tad smaller to get more info on screen So pretty damned happy overall, considering I was tossing up between this and the ipod Classic or Touch