intellidryad

I am also using iTunes and draging it over to my A720. Some comments: 1. iTunes sometimes adds album art as a PNG image, but the Walkman only reads JPG files, so you have to manually add a JPG file. Well, I don't have an iTunes account, so there's no "auto album art" option for me 2. You can set up iTunes to manage the file structure for you, and the folder names will be neatly managed as the artist & album names. 3. Of all that, you can uninstall or not install Apple update, other then that, Quicktime is the decoding/encoding engine for iTunes, with out it iTunes is just a useless shell; while I don't know why Apple doesn't let people who don't share music uninstall bonjour. So far, iTunes is the only software I know that can get all the tags and album art right. WMP and Sony Media Manager are simply 2 big nightmares. And yes, I also don't like it that I can't make playlists going this route. I sometimes use Songbird to make playlists, but some how it stopped recognizing my AAC files one day. I might try Media Monkey.

That really sucks. Well anyway, I returned the BestBuy one and just got a normal one from B&H photo. Sure enough, without that "B" behind the model number, I the language settings are there (including Japanese, which I've read have been left out on South East Asia models), and I am happy not to have that real player icon on the home menu. One note, I see many people here saying that the back of the new A820/A720s are plastic; yet I noticed that although knocking on it sounds like plastic, it does feel cool like metal after you left it laying around for sometime. This is similar to the Magnesium alloy case on my old Clie NX73 PDA, so that's what I suspect.

As far as I know, the A810 series first released with a paper slip that said "Media Manager would be available for download soon", so my guess would be later batches of the A810 series would have Media Manager included in the bundled CD-ROM. I am sure that Media Manager is not totally new as it first came out for the PSP some time ago. And no, it doesn't take ATRAC3.

Hi, thanks for sharing, yet all of them are only shown as spacer images with the Chinese line "This photo is limited to Baidu user sharing only".

As a Taiwanese who understands Chinese & English, I can tell you that once you learn the kana and basic grammar of Japanese (which only takes an half a year undergrad course), it's pretty easy from then on and you can practically start learning it on your own, if you know Chinese & English. A large part of Japanese is borrowed words from English and a little French; which many of the kanji still retains a similar meaning to that in Chinese.

Thank you so much! Just what I needed to know before returning the BestBuy version and buying it else where. Yes, Japanese MP3 ID3 tags do show up fine on my Walkman.

Thanks for the info. What I am afraid is that they deleted that function from all US models of the A820/A720 series. As far as I know, all A800/A810 modeis are multilingual, unless there is another "BestBuy version of A810" that I don't know of. For the A820/A720 series, Japanese models are Japanese only, the French pre-release model in the Youtube review is multilingual, yet my US-BestBuy is English only. I really hope to know where I can get a multilingual version.

If it's bought at BestBuy, it's English only. I learned it the hard way. BustBuy seems to sell customized versions that work with their own online music store. (Oh, BestBuy is an electronics store in the US, in case you don't know) I don't know if it's multilingual if you buy it straight from Sony USA, if someone here knows, please speak up, thanks!

I see on the Sony US site that the Black one is NWZ-A728BLK, not just "B"; and the pink one is "PNK". That's why I assumed the "B" is for BestBuy. Thank you for your advice, though. I think I will return this one. I decided in the first place to get it from BestBuy because they are on sell, $10 off Sony or JR's listed price. In this case, after I factored in the fact that no shipping fee needed if bought from the local BestBuy, and JR's $0 sells tax, they both round up to $193. Thus, avoiding the wait for shipping and considering that it's easier to return at a brick&mortar store, I went for it. Turns out I will be using that convenience of returns By the way, if anyone here wants to see more real life photos of this new Walkman, I have some on my blog to share: http://intellidryad.blogspot.com/2008/03/nwz-a728.html Please let me know if posting my own URL is not allowed here, which I hope not.

Hi, I'm a new member here! May I ask if anyone here has one of the NWZ-A720 series which is not bought from BestBuy? I just got an "NWZ-A728B" from BestBuy, and noticed that BestBuy added Rhapsody support, and thus, the added "B" in the end of the model name. Thus I got a "Realplayer" icon in the home menu. The bundled CD and manual are also BestBuy/Rhapsody-customized. I also noticed that my model has no menu language settings, where as I am sure the S710 series at Circuitcity does have language settings. So I am wondering if the deletion of multiple language menus is a result of BestBuy's customization, or a recent "downgrade" of the US version software of this new series? If indeed only the BestBuy version is crippled, I am very sure that I will be returning it and re-buying a normal one elsewhere.