Dinko

Here's another pointless question: After the firmware upgrades, does the A1000/A3000 still stop playback after playing an album or playlist?

I can't comment directly about the HD5, but the people over at the Gigabeat forums claim that defragmenting the Gigabeat improves its performance. Based on that, I tried defragmenting a 40GB RCA Lyra, but it took so long that I just abandoned after 6% completed defragmentation. If all DAPs take that long to defragment, then I don't know if it's worth the trouble of even trying.

Glad to hear everything works properly. Now, now... we got this far, don't ask for too much. Give them a few weeks of rest before asking for the moon.

Since your files are in mp3 and the transfer to the player is in Atrac, then it is normal that the process should take long. Transferring 6GB of music should be very fast without the conversion. What you could do is just transfer as mp3s, or you could stop the transfer process, convert all your files overnight and transfer them very rapidly the next day.

I had the same thing with an A1000. I thought it was normal. Some players from other brands just say something like "Do not disconnect" or "Do not unplug" and they don't change.

Your English is fine. Welcome to the boards. If your track titles are like those in picture 1.bmp, then don't worry. Connect Player should recognize the ID Tag and transfer it properly. That said, you have to have the artist name in the track title for Connect to recognize it. For example, looking at those pics, the Audioslave tracks should be easily recognized. However, above them you have some Bad Boy Blue albums which CONNECT Player will probably list as "Unknown Artist". You can then edit the tag either by using Connect Player or the tag editing program you show in 2.bmp

Cool looking case!

Funny. I love fanaticism. And I thought *I* was a Sony nut... As for stupid iPod garbages... it's not the best music player in the world, but so far I'm happy to report that 20 days in and my Nano still works properly. RealPlayer is doing great and iTunes is pretty fast. That's more than I can say about the poor A1000 which was a mess. I don't use any of the Nano's features other than music playback, and while it has its problems, at least I don't have to plan 3 hours ahead of time on what I want to listen to (that's of course if CONNECT actually launched properly). With the Nano, I just connect and transfer. No bugs. No hangs. Easy. The other part of what you're saying that I have a problem with is that Sony should never be at the forefront of technology and features. If that's the case, then we'd all better stop buying Sony products right now, because two years from now the company will disappear and you can forget about product warranty then. I'm not one to claim that a company should respond to every stupidity demanded by the consumer market. But there are some basics which, whether you like it or not, are becoming standard and they have to be there for people to buy the product. Take cars. Years ago, everyone was advertising air bags as superb ad-ons. Nowadays, cars that don't have air bags won't go anywhere. What used to be a luxury is now standard fare. At least it is where I am. The car sales people now mention air bags in the same sentence as FM radio. They have to say it, but they know nobody's listening to the list of standard specs. Finally, as for Sony being about people who can handle it, and not being for amateurs, what you're basically saying is two parted: (1) that people need the time to learn how to use the device, and need to plan 3 hours ahead of time, what music they want to transfer to their device. That's all nice and well in a pretty world where we do nothing else but listen to music, unfortunately, if you live that life, many of us do not. We prefer to have a device which works. Something that doesn't take 2 days to import a few hundred files, and something that doesn't take 5 minutes to start, and something that doesn't gobble up 98% of CPU performance. That appears to be the case of some of the people here who were very successful with their purchases. It is not the case of the other part. Maybe we should have a poll to see how many bought A1000s and A3000s and had no glitches, and how many had major problems with them. (2) that Sony can't come up with something that's functional I see absolutely no reason to sacrifice functionality just so the company can put a four-letter stamp on the player and pretend it to be "special" when in reality it is not. The problem with your argument though, is that, other than being gratuitously insulting, it doesn't make sense. Because Sony players are for amateurs. Once you get your music on them that is. Using most Sony players is easy and intuitive. Browsing around is simple & convenient. No stupid click wheels that rub against your coat with each footstep blasting volume to Max before rubbing back the other way with the next footstep and lowering volume back down again. Where Sony players require special skills is in the software department. Now, freaks like us can put up with Sony's software incompetense because we love the gadgets, and we're willing to take some time to make them work. The average person though, neither has the time, nor the patience, nor in many cases the skills or willingness to put up with capricious software just to get their music onto their music device. It's easier to just return it and get something easier to use. As crazy as I am about Sony devices, and as much as I love the looks of the A1000, at this point, even I was unwilling to put with more nonsense and just returned it. The burden in 2005 (soon 2006) is on the manufacturer to make his product competitive, not on the customer to put up with a company living in the past. Today, one of the key functionalities for any gadget is ease of use. Sony players are easy to use, if you can manage to get your music on them, but doing that is much harder than it sounds. And given the other options in the market found in better players from brands as diverse as Samsung, Toshiba and Gateway, any product which is hard to use across the whole spectrum, not just the hardware, will lose out in the long term. And it's a great strategy. Given how gorgeous and different the new players look, I wouldn't be surprised to find a bunch of people buying them just to get something that isn't an iPod, and seeing how all the other players look like iPods with their touch pads, touch strips, scroll bars and other touch-sensitive gimmicks, the A1/3000 are the only real alternatives. Unfortunately, for some of us with negative experience, the alternative isn't really credible. I was looking at a 4-8GB player, and avoided the iPod Mini and iPod Nano like the plague. The moment I saw FutureShop had the A1000 in stock, I rushed in to see the new A1000. I didn't intend to buy. I just wanted to see. But I fell in love. Seeing the A1000 in person was incredible. I couldn't resist. I found a bunch of excuses to get it. And I did. The rest is sadly documented on these boards. After a miserable week of wasting time with Connect, and other problems, I just got pissed, packed it all up in frustration and regret and took it back. A few days later, seeing no alternative, I returned to the store, head bent in shame, and got a Nano... contrary to what I had sworn never to do, right here on ATRAC Life. I said I would never buy an iPod. There I was, asking the FutureShop clerk for a black 4GB Nano... Pathetic, but sadly true. I feel like a traitor, and I hate myself for not liking the A1000. But it was a lame excuse for a DAP, and in the end, the Connect Walkman was not an iPod killer. For me, personally, it was a Sony killer. It was a fantastic player... critically flawed.

28kbps? Isn't that kind of low? :giggles: I know, I know... 48kbps.

They'll learn some day. 2 years from now Sony will have the best music player on the market (including software). Until then, better look elsewhere. You're right though. Creative's new player is what Sony should have come up with. Especially if they found some way to magically make it as small as the iPod yet still feature all the features of the Creative.

SonyBMG Masterworks (the combination of Sony Classical and BMG Classics) is apparently the #1 classical label, according to the way the label interprets numbers: http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories....04238712&EDATE= I myself haven't considered Sony Classical or RCA Victor much of a classical label for most of the past five years, but since their merger things are really improving on the classical side. That isn't really reflected in their press release though. Most of the titles they speak of are either crossover or film scores.

Use another software to transcode the mp3s into mp3s... It used to happen with SonicStage, so I would use dbPowerAMP to "convert" the mp3s into mp3s or wma files and SonicStage would recognize the converted files but not the original ones.

Having been playing with an iPod Nano for a couple of weeks and having played with a friend's Gigabeat, I would indeed recommend the Gigabeat over the iPod. User interface on the Gigabeat isn't quite as clean as on the iPod, but it's full of customization options, sound quality is almost as good as Sony and features lots of preset equalizers (although it's built-in user-equalizer is pathetic: bass & treble only), it doesn't stop playback everytime an album ends, it has a fantastic screen, it's fast to control once you get the hang of it, you can delete tracks on the go... Heck, the only things missing are: FM Radio & Line in recording. It also doesn't attract fingerprints - the casing isn't very reflective. The screen is fairly easy to clean once you smudge it. On the other hand, the iPod is easier to control, has lots of accessories for it, is smaller than the Gigabeat, plays video, has games & syncs with calendar. I don't know what the prices in the UK are, but right now, Best Buy Canada is selling off the Gigabeats at ridiculously low prices and has often done so in the past two months. The 20GB Gigabeat goes for 250$, while the 4GB Nano and the 6GB A1000 go for 299$. Hell, I'm seriously tempted to return the Nano and get a Gigabeat instead. Check local stores. Toshiba looks like it might be undercutting other brands to increase Gigabeat market share.

Had something similar happen with MD Simple Burner. After ripping a CD to a minidisc, the software would display the tracks properly, but once the MD player was disconnected from the PC, the track order was reversed. Track 25 became track 1, track 24 became track 2, etc. I've never had this happen with flash or HDD players though.

'coz it's a lot more interesting. On some players you can pick a picture and put it as your wallpaper behind the menu/track details. So it acts like computer screen wallpaper. Completely useless from a functional perspective. But it makes life much more interesting. As for watching the player... given that the new Sony players stop after they finish playing a playlist or an album, you'll be spending a lot of time looking at the screen to make it play music again. With the new Sonys, the risks of getting hit by a bus aren't any lower than with a colour screen. It they had a colour screen it would at least have been a more pleasurable experience than just plain text (which is good enough until you move to colour - it's so hard switching back to monochrome - looking at my HD1 next to a friend's Gigabeat is like watching TV in B&W vs Colour). His Gigabeat showcasing the Walkman Bean: Do forgive the muddy picture, I just can't learn to take digital photos.

Careful though... if I have my Archos models right, this one seems to be having some LCD troubles that Archos won't aknowledge. As for Nano vs. A1000... I think the comparison is fair. The Nano replaced the Mini, and it only shows how much further Sony still has to go. Sony came up with a competitor to the Mini, while Apple was killing off the Mini and moving on to something completely different. And, as Ascariss pointed out, in Canada, both the A1000 and the 4GB Nano are selling for exactly the same price ($299CDN). The A1000 has 2GB of storage more than the Nano, but the Nano has many more features, which easily compensate for the 2GB of storage it's missing. And when it comes to earphones that come with players... I keep the ones the come with the player. Most of the portable music players I've had (going back to the cassette Walkman days), were Sony players and I was always satisfied with the provided earbuds. There are two exceptions: PSP and Nano. Both came with horrible-sounding earbuds (interestingly both are white). Other than those, I still haven't found earbuds that sound better than the ones Sony provides with its players. Real (the over-the-ear type) headphones sound better, but not all Sony players can power them properly, and they're not very convenient relative to earbuds anyway. I ditched the Nano earbuds pretty fast, but so far, I really haven't found good-sounding earbuds bought separately, regardless of brand or price. The closest I came to good sounding earbuds other than Sony ones provided with the player was a pair of Sennheiser buds bought from Minidisc Canada, but those broke down after less than 6 months. Talk about quality! Sony earbuds bought separately from the player have always been disappointing (lack of bass on one model, uncomfortable in the long run on another, weird feel and overall not very good for music when you're walking on the street - a noise-cancelling pair). So... I just keep the Sony earbuds that come with Sony players and then use them on other players too.

According to this place: http://www.mp3players.jp/exec/detail/B000BHLSV2/ " 5mW + 5mW " is the closest we get to mW output information.

Well... it's neither flash player discussion (the NW-A1000 is hard drive based), nor hard drive based discussion (the Nano is flash memory based). Besides, it's not really about Sony devices, it's about Sony devices & Apple stuff. About two weeks ago I bought a Sony NW-A1000 player. After a dissappointing 5-day experience, I returned it. Some time later, I went back and got an Apple iPod Nano. Here's a personal rant regarding both players and how they compare based on the features which I find important. This rant is divided in three parts: - A1000 < Nano - A1000 > Nano - A1000 = Nano Part 1: Nano Better than A1000 - Size / Weight Can't help but marvel at the size of the Nano. Where Sony made the new players bigger, Apple shrunk the Nano to almost nothing. The screen is vibrant enough to make up for its small size. - Clickwheel / User interface / Ease of Use I had never really played with an iPod. I always thought they were overrated when it came to menu browsing. I just couldn't see how something would that much easier to browse than the RCA Lyra RD2584 or the Sony NW-HD1. Now, while it took me some time to get used to the A1000's controls (left/right/back/option/volume/etc), successful interaction with the Nano was almost immediate. The click wheel does an excellent job, although I find it highly sensitive. Some very nice touches in the menu. Possibility to browse/play by composer for example, in addition to artist, album, playlist or song. I don't know how handy that is in pop music, but since I listen mostly to film scores and classical, that's a very handy function. It eliminates the conflict with respect to artist. Is the artist the composer, or the performer? Browsing by composer, as long as the tags are properly maintained simplifies the dilemma. Nano = very easy to use. - Features clock-stopwatch-world clock; games; text; calendar; picture viewing / album cover art The Nano has them, the NW-A1000 does not. They can be considered either as crap that raises the asking price and does not belong on an audio player, or potentially useful options which may come in handy. I don't need games, and the mini-screen while decent, can't really be used to display pictures in a proper way. Text and clock functions can be useful though. - Independence from Manufacturer's Software For better, though mostly for worse, we're stuck with proprietary Sony software to run the A1000. One of the applications is not fully compatible with the player, the other is a pain in the a** for some of us. The Nano however is compatible with RealPlayer and some other applications, such that users are not emprisonned in iTunes. As useful software, iTunes itself still sucks as much as it ever did. That said it does have some significant advantages over Sony software: iTunes is fast, doesn't crash as often, and it's also very fast... ooops - repetition. Importing tracks, and general functions of the software are incomparably fast relative to CONNECT or SonicStage. Conversion of WMA files to AAC is much faster than SonicStage conversion of the same WMA files to ATRAC3. - Sound Output Sony still can't provide enough juice in its players to power large headphones or a home stereo. The microscopic Nano has enough power to send a clear signal to large Philips over-the-head headphones. What that does to the battery is a different issue. The point is, that if you want giant headphones that Sony players can't provide enough power to, the Nano does the job quite decently. - More formats How many years did it take for Sony's Walkman division to add mp3? We're still waiting for that announced WMA direct playback upgrade. In any case, the Nano comes enabled with various playback formats (mp3, aac, wav, aiff... pick and choose). WMA playback on the Sony players will be fantastic once available, and Protected WMA would make the Sony players truly competitive with just about everything else, and far more interesting choices than the iPod. After a long while, iTunes can finally import unprotected WMA files, transcode them to AAC and transfer them to the player. - Comes with carrying pouch Most likely due to that lawsuit that's going on about how easily it scratches, the Nano now ships with a small soft envelope-like pouch. Who cares? Given that Sony often included one, I would have liked to have one. I have an old pouch from an older NetMD recorder and that could fit. I find it hard to believe that a carrying pouch was that much more expensive that Sony couldn't include one. - Playlists Yes, the A1000 has them. And no, I couldn't create playlists on the player itself. Using RealPlayer, I hooked up the Nano, created a playlist directly on it, and moved tracks from one playlist to the other playlist. Couldn't just create playlists on the A1000. The playlists necessarily had to be created on the PC first, then transferred/sync'ed with the player. Part 2: A1000 Better than Nano - Build Quality, Fingerprints & Scratches Both are unremovable from the Nano. After two hours of ownership, the Nano already had microscratches... and some not so micro ones. The shiny back of the Nano is best not even looked at, desecrated as it is by a layer of fingerprints which seems to thicken every few hours. The A1000... now there's something that everyone (especially the anti-Sony crowd) kept predicting would scratch very easily and would attract fingerprints. That it does the latter is no question. But: (1) Fingerprints stuck on the A1000 are fairly easy to clean, and a well-cleaned A1000 won't show any trace of them (2) Fingerprint attraction levels on the A1000 are nowhere near the ridiculous level of the Nano. Sure, I have very beautiful fingerprints, but I'm not sure I want to look at them every single second I look at the player. The Sony A1000 feels solid. The Nano feels "good enough". I'm not under the impression that the Nano will break or is particularly fragile, but holding the Sony makes the A1000 feel very solid, and almost unbreakable. - Sound "Good sound" does not equal "loud sound". An advantage of the Nano is that it can output enough power to make big headphones sound good. But when it comes to small earbuds, it's... flat. In the Nano's case, quality of sound is inversely proportional to its size. Incredibly small player = Incredibly unremarkable sound. It's not that's it's bad, although some EQ settings are very poor. It's just that it's... bland. Depending on the earphones you use, you'll have to tweak the settings. The Sony A1000 on the other hand, while it cannot power larger headphones, it does have enough juice to overpower the average human eardrums using the supplied earbuds. Crisp & clear highs; good-enough bass line; and neither at the expense of middle frequencies. "The Sony Sound" maintains the recording's depth and clarity. The sound on the Nano either flattens or otherwise distorts the recording's balance. It's not unbearable. In fact, it's pretty average, but it is by far inferior to what the Sony A1000 does. Once again, pop & rock music don't show that as much as other types. I don't know anyone who tests their audiophile system by playing the latest Britney Spears CD. But when playing orchestral music, all the sonic superiority of the Sony players comes to the front. I'm sorry for all the folks who keep saying that the new iPods (Shuffle, Nano and Video versions) have much better sound than their predecessors. I can only imagine how poorly previous iPods sounded! Now, I'm quite sure that someone will come in and say "well, yeah but you're comparing different files and formats". So? The Sony was optimized to play ATRAC files. It does a pretty good job at playing mp3s too. The Nano was optimized to play AAC files. It's not *that* successful at it. I used each with the format it was primarily intended for. End score: Sony NW-A1000: 10 (first rate) Apple iPod Nano: 5 (does its job, and nothing more) Changing the earbuds doesn't change the ultimate reality: the Sony NW-A1000 sounds much better than the Nano. The Nano's (in-)famous white Apple earbuds are pathetic. The sound is hollow, artificial, lacking high frequencies and featuring some aritifical sounding lows and a distorted sonic picture of the music which is playing. The overall sound of the supplied earbuds is poor, at best. Where the Nano redeems itself is with larger headphones, or louder volume settings using non-Apple earbuds. In find some Sony players become acid and shrill if you push the volume too high. The A1000 is follows the same patterns. The Nano does pretty well at higher volumes (with a decent sent of headphones of course). In fact, I would say it sound best when played loud. Which would certainly explain the concerns that iPod usage is leading to hearing loss. To make it sound good, you need to blast your eardrums. Not a very good idea. - Grouped alphabetical browsing The A1000's grouping of tracks in alphabetical subgroups (A-G, H-M or whatever the exact groups were), is pretty cool. Alphabetical search as well. I'm not sure how useful that is on a small capacity player, but on a 20 Gigger, it should be pretty nice. - ATRAC The primary reason I was stuck to Sony players was that much of my music collection is in Atrac3 at 132 kbps. Regardless of what questionnable studies on the digital formats have to say about ATRAC, I trust my ears more than a study. ATRAC@132kbps sounds much better than any other format at a similar bit/compression rate. Not to mention how much more energy efficient ATRAC is. - Gapless Here again... gapless for pop or rock CDs doesn't matter as much as it does for classical, film music, live recordings, long dance mixes, or just about any other form of music which requires the music to flow from one track to the next. Once more, the iPod has one hell of a disadvantage relative to other players. Toshiba & Samsung players for example don't have true gapless, but at least there are no loud clicks and pops between tracks. The iPod is like and old vynil record: when the reading head hits the record right before the first song starts, there's a "pop". RCA managed to create some near-gapless gadgets. But the king of gapless has always been Sony. The A1000 was true to form. On a related note, the Sony players are among the very few, if not the only ones, in which you can rewind or fast forward your way through to the next track, or back to the last one. Neither the Nano, nor most mp3 players can do that. For example, on Sony players holding the REWIND button takes you to the beginning of the track playing, then if you don't release it, the player will rewind the previous track too. Other players take you to the beginning of the track you're playing, then stop there and start playback. - Software Buggy as it is, SonicStage has my favourite layout among music management applications. Plus, track editing is easy. The colour scheme and button positioning makes it very easy to use. iTunes sucks. I'll keep at that to remain civil. Part 3: Where they both stink - Alphabetical playlists vs. Group Structure Older Sony players could play in "Group" structure. We've been over this before, but the new players, either iPod or A1000 can only play by alphabetical order. Sure, you can create a smart playlist that automatically adds new tracks to it. But say you buy four CDs. All the tracks from all four CDs will be added to the playlist. Now, how do you move to the next album? On older Sony players, if the album was transferred as a group, you just click the "GROUP" button, then the "skip" button, or on some remotes, you just hit the "Group Skip" button. Very useful. - Playback Stops Both players are inherently flawed: they play one album, then stop. They play one playlist, then stop. They play one artists' tracks then stop. That, is lame. Constantly having to take the player out of a pocket or a school bag to browse on to the next album because the player just stopped playback is ridiculous when you just want the music to keep on playing. I might as well be dragging minidiscs with me and change them everytime one of them ends. Part of the purpose of a multi-gigabyte music collection is to keep the music flowing. If it doesn't, we're no better off than during the old days. Samsung, RCA and Toshiba can implement seamless transition between albums. So did the old Sony. I find it moronic that the #1 company in the industry can't figure it out and implement it in its iPods, while the inventor of the Walkman, instead of moving forward, took a step backward. - Features Other manufacturers implemented various useful features which neither player has: FM radio; FM recording; voice recording; line-in recording; screensavers & wallpapers; playback speed changes; display customizations; on-the-go editing (delete track, move around - no need for computer software); programmable buttons and God knows what else. - Weird cables Proprietary is evil. The Nano is too thin, but the Sony is fat enough to host a regular mini-USB connection like older Sony players did. The Toshiba Gigabeat has it's proprietary dock plug. But it also has a regular mini-USB connector. "One Cable to Rule Them All" I say. Then there's other things. The Sony cable was excessively short. The Apple cable is hard to unplug. The Sony came with a giant AC adapter which you plug the USB cable into to recharge it. The Nano doesn't even have an AC adapter. The End of a Rant The A1000 was a huge dissappointment. Of course, disappointment is always relative and directly related to expectations. While my expectations were high for the A1000, given how all the iPod nuts rave about iPods, expectations about the Nano were even higher. The A1000 didn't quite live up to lower expectations (lower relative to the iPod that is). The Nano mostly did live up to the higher expectations (higher relative to expectations about the A1000). I won't be returning the Nano as I did the A1000. Sound quality once tweaked is quite acceptable on the Nano. The size and ease of use of the player, as well as the software make up for it's ugly looks, Easy-Scratch™ surface, and lack of gapless playback. The rest of its annoying features are similar to those of the A1000. That said, iPods are seriously overrated. They offer few major improvements relative to other players in the market, and contain an equal amount of annoyances to make them inferior to part of the competition. Here's a couple of muddy pictures.

Funny... that's exactly what I ended up doing. And while the Nano has disadvantages relative to the Sony, I won't be returning it like I did with the A1000.

I really prefer Sonic Stage over CONNECT. SonicStage 3.3, while still not optimal in terms of speed, offers everything I would want from a music management software. It is clearly laid out. Menus are logically developed. The different menu screens are based on the same template. Such that the CD-to-Library Screen is similar to the Library-to-Playlist screen and similar to the Library-to-Device or Library-to-CD screen. In Connect, some of these are different. The buttons move all over the place, depending on which function/screen is displayed. CDDB connection is good to have, but often the CDDB track titles will not correspond to the track titles the user may want to have. Editing the ID tags in CONNECT is a long and painful process. SonicStage is much easier to use in this respect. Once the tracks have been imported to the library, one can select many tracks and use right-click on the mouse to edit properties. During import, basic information can be easily edited by using the Artist, Album, and Genre fields at the top of the SonicStage import screen to edit those fields for the whole CD, and alternatively editing each track artist individually is simplified by clicking on the track and either hitting the F2 key, or a second mouse click. Moving between tracks to edit them one after the other is easy in SonicStage: arrow keys or tab key. These functions are disabled in CONNECT. The abundance of purple and grey in Connect creates a monochrome view. The Sonic Stage colour scheme is significantly easier to follow. Importation of tracks in SonicStage is easier to follow as a progress bar is clearly displayed. Connect does have some advantages. Top left part, where all drives and devices are shown, as opposed to using the SonicStage pull-down menu. The CONNECT folder/tree-like database is much better than the double click required in SonicStage. In CONNECT, the library organization is clearer: Choose to display the library by artist. Under each artist there are albums, and under each album there are tracks. Connect does not change screens like SonicStage. Rather, Connect simply opens the subfolders and shows their contents = faster & clearer. Import of tracks to the library, does not disable other Connect functions. In Sonic Stage, while the software is importing tracks from other folders into the SonicStage library, no other functions are possible. In Connect, one can simultaneously import tracks from other folders, and still perform other tasks (editing existing tracks, creating playlists, etc).

No. The model I experienced had no seals or other parts that you had to cut or tear. You can easily open the box, use the product, then repackage it as it was originally. If you're careful, you can make it look brand new after you repackage it. But... maybe Sony has different packagings. In Canada, the same Sony product is often available in two types of packaging: cardboard boxes you can easily repackage, and vacuum plastic which once opened cannot be resealed.

For those who want true drag & drop via Windows Explorer from Sony... you migth want to buy a Sony Giga Panel car stereo... http://www.dapreview.net/comment.php?comment.news.2636

Sorry to say, but in retrospect, all the whining and complaining that I did on these boards about CONNECT & the NW-A1000 was useless. As was talking to Sony. After playing with it some more, I found the NW-A1000 very unfriendly. It's final trial came yesterday when I tried blindly controlling it while it was in my pocket and I was on the bus. I kept accidentally hitting the artist link button (which never did anything but stopped what I was trying to achieve) while looking for other controls. I had to take it out of my pocket every time in order to visually fix what I had mistakenly done. For whatever reason, it kept stopping playback at the end of the track or album. What I mean is, that in Normal Playback Mode, if I selected to play an album, the player played all the songs in the album, then stopped. It didn't move to the next album. Once off, I had to take the player out of my pocket, and browse the menus to manually select the next album I wanted to play. This is sheer lunacy. Every crappy player that I've seen so far, when in Normal playback mode and asked to play music in ALBUM mode, plays the selected album, then moves to the next one once the first is finished. I tried fixing the A1000 settings, but I could find no option in the menu to tell it to keep on playing. I also tried using a minidisc remote. Volume, play, stop, and the track buttons worked. Album skip or group skip buttons did not work. Only way to move to the next album: to take the player out and visually/manually browse the menus. In other words, be like all the zombies walking around staring at their iPods looking for their music, as opposed to easily navigating the music on the player. Then there's the hold button. Shutting the player off and pressing the hold button does not engage hold. Hold only seemed to work when player is on. There must be a way, but I'm too lazy to read the user manual just find out how to engage hold, when such a basic function is so easy on other players. So today, I went to Future Shop, returned the player and got a full refund. I still need a 4-8GB mini player. It won't be an Apple. But it won't be a Sony.

dapreview.net had a link to someone who posted a review of it and said that the Sony Store sales person showed it to him by mistake but ended up selling it anyway.

Somehow, I don't know how, but CONNECT finally agreed to be updated to the newest Canadian version. Still not the latest version available, but better than the one that came on the CDROM.