The Mule

Once the volume is unlocked its impossible to increase it anymore. But I know what you mean, when you change the EQ to any of the settings the volumes drops.

I used to convert all my downloaded mp3's to atrac but its not worth it. I just stick to mp3 from now on

Do sony mp3 players really sound better than iPod's? How come?

Not too fussed about touchscreen or watching videos or photos on a walkman. I use it primarily for music. I would like to see a smaller, lighter, higher capacity version of the a3000.

You can pick up a new nw-a3000 for under £100 on ebay these days.

Yeah, it seems to be misleading. Looks like the reviewer made the mistake of thinking there was some form of transcoding going on during playback when in actual fact its simply a case of DRM/MP3's in an omg container.

Strange that a reviewer would come out with information that wasn't true.

I don't think Sony should have given up on atrac because it certainly had its merits but it didn't really catch on. I download all my music off the net in MP3 format. I used to convert them to Atrac because I wanted gapless. Then when I started storing MP3's I realised they were being played back in gapless aswell. As far as sound quality is concerned, that was one of the main things Sony believed was superior with Atrac compared to its rival formats. Eventually they gave up because other formats had cornered the market and after years of development they gave up (which seems a waste of all the years they spent developing atrac).

Was reading a review of the MW-A3000 and found this bit of technical info Never knew that when playing a track the machine converts the MP3 signal to ATRAC before amplifying it. Don't really see the point in doing that. It just means more work for the processor to do and that is why the battery runs out faster with MP3's. So no matter whether you listen to MP3's or Atrac3, it will be an Atrac signal you hear in your headphones. I'm sure the newer models won't do this, since it seems to be a measure taken by Sony when they still had ambitions for Atrac.

EX-71's all the way!

Probably about 40 tracks or so - I'm using Mp3's, i think the main problem will be trying to find all the tracks with no year because their scattered out over various albums....and then restore the files from the recycle bin because i deleted them after transfer :-)

Yeah, i noticed that it doesnt give you the option to edit the release year, only the other information. Even Connect player let you edit the year. I had a bad feeling i would have to re-transfer the music over with the info updated.

My Walkman has a lot of tracks which have no information in the year field and this causes problems with searches and the artist link function. With v4.3 is there anyway of editing the Release Date/Year once the track is on the player?

I think a lot of people are frustrated because no-one responds to their queries and they look elsewhere for answers

The main reason for changing is that i download 90% of my music in mp3 format. I had been converting all these mp3's to atrac when i transferred them to the player so i could have gapless, and this was time consuming. When Sony announced it was abandoning Atrac i thought it would be a good time to switch to mp3 as i had only about 3.5Gb on a 20Gb machine. Since listening to mp3's on the player i notice that it's gapless aswell! I'm definitely sticking with mp3 from now on but i do have a couple of gripes about it. When playing VBR mp3's the clock timer goes crazy while the track is playing, obviously some kind of time code problem playing bit rates which arent constant. And trying to get SonicStage 4.3 installed on my PC is hell because i don't have an internet connection on my home PC. I tried to download the SonicStageInstaller onto a disc but when i load it on my PC requests the server. So overall, changing from mp3 has been worthwhile but trying to upgrade the software has been troublesome.

I'm changing because atrac has been declared obselete and it will save me converting my mp3's to atrac in the future.

So i upgraded to SonicStage CP 4.3 and started transferring MP3's to the device. Now i find when play back tracks with a variable bit rate the clock/timer at the bottom left corner of the NW-A3000 screen goes crazy jumping back and forth rather than just going forward. I vaguely remember someone talking about this on this forum a while back but i cant find the thread. Anyone else experienced this? It says that Firmware 3.0 supported VBR but there seems to be some sort of glitch.

I've just formatted the walkman. Now I'm looking to upgrade the software, and am downloading SonicSTage CP

Most of the stuff i have on the player is stored on my PC in mp3 format anyway. I had been converting it to Atrac just so I could use gapless. But this process is pretty time consuming, plus I have been using Connect Version 1.0 as the later versions don't let you convert mp3 to Atrac. I have to admit i am very tempted just to start afresh after hearing that Atrac was going to be made redundant. I have a lot of music still to add to the player and changing to Mp3 would also mean i could upgrade to the latest software and have my music transfered over much quicker.

I have a 20Gb player which is roughly 3Gb full. All the files stored on it are atrac (i used this format because I prefer gapless). Having just read that this format is going to be rendered obsolete I was wondering whether I should go through the hassle of deleting it all and replacing them with MP3's since only a small percentage of the memory is filled. The other option is to keep on adding songs in atrac format. Quite interested to see if other atrac users are continuing to add songs to their players in atrac format or if they have "converted" to MP3.

I found that re-encoding from MP3 to Atrac3 was fine as long as the bit rate is kept the same. I do this with all the songs I transfer (to increase battery life) and there isnt any noticeable loss in sound quality.

Thanks I'll give it a try