Beethovenian

Just tried this method. It was actually pretty fast, maybe 15 minutes (my player is full). Couldn't see any difference, to be honest.

What he means is having the ability to add a track or album to your currently playing list, so you don't need to go browse your albums again when the current one finishes playing. I think that's almost a must requirement now for MP3 players.

I think the big drop in battery life has less to do with bitrates or EQ and more with lack of caching memory. I've noticed if you browse more your library battery will go down very fast, because the player needs to access the hard-drive to get the database information almost every time. I'm sure Sony could make real battery life get closer to their announced ones if they added more RAM and cached the database in it, instead of having it on the HD. That would also make the player less annoying when it gets stuck for some seconds just to load the list of tracks or albums.

Defragmenting helps, even if the Defrag program says it's not necessary or there's not enough space to do it. It's slow not because of the amount of music you have. It happens even with more free space available. It's just some mistake in the firmware and the way the database file is placed, I believe.

Defragmenting helps just if it's too slow during navigation (it may get incredibly slow just to move from one list to the next). The 3-4 seconds to access the menu from now playing or to skip to the next track will remain there. It's ridiculous, really, that Sony doesn't put enough RAM there to have fast access to the database. To me, that's what happens. Every time you access the menu or skip a track, the player needs to spin up the HD to access the database and learn what to do. I'm tempted to say the A3000 is even slower than the HD1 (it certainly is much slower to startup).

I agree with all you say, Lamewing. All this talk about not allowing drag-and-drop because of copyright protection sounds stupid when Sony itself offers support for that in the PSP (and the Sony Ericsson Walkman phones, I believe?). What they need to do is extricate Atrac of the OpenMG restrictions and distribute free plugins for other software. Then the format could also have a second lease on life (let other DAP makers support it as well). Go on, create your own music management software, but let people use any other they want by moving the database creation to the player itself, not the PC. That may also help in reducing the ridiculous load times you have to wait to jump tracks or accessing the menu. And I think a good interface example is the Gigabeat S one, the Portable Media Center. When you browse your artists lists, it displays thumbnails of album covers. I agree, it's nice to see the cover when looking for your music.

For now, the $199 price for an 8GB player seems pretty competitive. Of course, Apple may soon drop a bigger capacity iPod with flash memory and that will wipe any price-advantage Sony may have now. What worries me, though, is that releasing the player here may mean they don't expect to have a newer player so soon. I think the A series is way too flawed to survive long, and Sony needs to come up with something better, more solid as fast as possible. And it could make a market research to check what people really want. I doubt users of the A series see much need for Artist Link.

I think you need first to login to your Connect account, in the Connect store, and authorize your computer (every Windows installation or reasonable change in the system will make SS identify the computer as a new one). You should also ask them to delete the old authorized computer, so that it doesn't take one of your allowed slots. I'm assuming, of course, you have a Connect account. If you don't, I don't really know how to do this. Honestly, I think the better option is to eliminate copy protection and save the files independently, without the backup tool. Even though you may lose compilations, it's better than depending on these stupid authorizations.

I had this problem once as well, and use it as an excuse to migrate from CP to SS (4, in the case). Inititalizing the HD and retransferring solved the problem. I have no idea, though, how the database could be corrupted by simply charging the player, especially since I did it from the wall, not the computer.

Ascariss, you're the luckiest Sony user around. Everything seems to work fine for you. No way transfer of Atrac files is as fast for me as an MP3 is for you. Using SonicStage CP, sending 1GB to the player takes like one full hour, if not more. Connect Player is faster, but not much. Both take a long time just preparing the files, and do it in a way that makes you wonder if it hadn't crashed. As for the hold button, I wished it was just a switch that didn't depend on the player being on.

Agree with everything you said, JamieB. I just timed the startup time of the A3000, from sleep to playing music, and it took 14.4 seconds, three times what the HD1 takes. It's too much for features that I doubt people will consistently use after an initial curiosity. Not to mention that these features are useless if you don't frequently connect the player to its software. (Thinking about that, Sony seems to overcharge for its hardware, since they don't provide enough cache memory to avoid slowdowns during navigation nor embed the "intelligence" of its features into the player itself.)

Ops, I assumed Gaz's reply referred to the "will it ever be straight" part. I'm (almost) sure you'll be able to move all your atrac and mp3 files, though I'm not so sure you'll be able to do it without reformatting the player, since Connect Player and SonicStage use different types of databasing. But to be honest, the only reason I'm sticking with Sony is for gapless playback (I listen to too much classical music to be without it). Otherwise I'd buy the new Toshiba Gigabeat S, which is the sexiest player around, in my opinion.

So odd. And the amazing thing is that all these problems were created because Sony didn't do the right thing of putting the "intelligent" features directly in the player, as Rio did almost three years ago with the Karma. That certainly makes SS, and CP before, bloated and more difficult to handle. Not to mention that it's ridiculous that you have to connect the player to the PC software to have a song you just played displayed in the Play History.

I think Gaz's response is likely to be true. Considering Sony's history in this department, I doubt they'll let you have such an easy time and just upgrade to a new program... After all, where's the fun in having something that just works?

The "No songs" message suggest your player have a corrupted database. Maybe you would do better by reformatting it and transferring again. As for the updating of artist link data, if you have many songs it will take a while, maybe hours. But as far as I know you don't need to keep the player connected while it's downloading that information. It should theoretically update the information the next time you connect it. Just make sure the player pane displays its track contents, and don't display any type of running activity.

So it seems that this is one of the bad collateral effects of SS4. I suppose if you reformat your hard-drive and transfer your files again via SS4 the albums will reappear in order. Why they don't do it when you're just upgrading to the new software is anyone's guess. And this is particularly annoying when you consider that SS4 is much slower to transfer than SS3.4, probably because of the artistlink feature, which I wish Sony just got rid of (as it works now, I don't really see utility for it; it should just be another shuffle option in the menu, without requiring all this CDDB thing).

Wow, that's a very strange case that defies all notions of how these things should work. At least you proved that unprotected Atrac files can be salvaged directly from the player, if for some reason you have to do it. GYM should take care of the MP3s. CP is obsolete, and SonicStage makes the player too slow to navigate. We're really well served here...

Very bizarre, I have no idea what is happening with these changes in artists orders. I didn't notice anything like that when I used SonicStage 4. I'm using Connect Player to transfer to the Walkman. Even though Sony has officially discontinued it, I find that SonicStage 4 makes my player unbearably slow to navigate. It takes 2 or 3 seconds just to move from the A to the B column while browsing the list of artists. Apparently, defragmenting the Walkman helps, but I'm still not willing to try it. ub, did you check if your mp3s have just one type of tag (like id3v2 or id3v1)? Maybe the player reads only one type and you had the other. Though that doesn't make sense if you had them before displaying the correct info. I don't know what's going on. Just when you thought Sony was getting things right...

One thing not clear to me is: Did you actually copy your music directly from the Walkman to the new PC? Supposedly, that's not the way it should work, since the Walkmans are made not to allow you to re-import files to a different PC than the one that originated them. In any case, if it worked, better. I assume the change that SS made to the MP3s during transfer, wrapping them in the .oma container, made them unworkable now, so you should import them again from your discs. But then comes the next strange thing. Did Connect Player accept your SonicStage-loaded Walkman? To me, if I load the player via SonicStage, connecting it to CP will produce an error message, saying the player is not compatible and has to be initialised. In any case, Connect Player and SonicStage use different transfer methods and databases, so CP shouldn't be able to sync anything transferred by SS. As for the syncrhonisation itself, theoretically, any change that you make in CP is updated in the Walkman when you connect it. It works for me, unless I delete the file from the library and re-import it. (I do it, ironically, because I think SS is much better to edit information than CP, so to have updated files in CP I delete them and import then again, so they reflect changes made in SS.)

How many songs do you have, YosNoor? I'm still too afraid of moving to SonicStage and be unable to get the same results as yours and then be forced to transfer everything again with Connect. And also, is it possible to defrag a completely filled hard-drive? I think Windows requires some free space, and that's something missing for me, since I have more than 45GB of music encoded in Atrac.

This is weird. I don't use SonicStage 4 to load my player because it makes it too slow, but when I did it, I didn't notice anything different about the artist order. What do you mean by having artists under album title? What kind of order is that? If you go to A in artists, does it show albums instead of artists?

Has anybody else tried the defrag method? It would be interesting to see if that may make the player's navigation as fast as with CP-loaded files. I won't try it for now because it would be a hassle to go back to CP if it doesn't provide the same performance. Another question: What happens if you load your player using CP and then connect it to SonicStage? I know SS recognizes it and doesn't ask you immediately to format the player, but what happens next? Once I accidentally did that and ended up with a useless player, since SS just got stuck and corrupted my player's database. Assuming it doesn't get stuck, though, what can happen? Does it update usage, artistlink info etc.? Does it make your player as slow as when you load everything with SS?

Difficult situation. Are your Atrac files free of copy protection? If not, the first thing I'd do is remove the protection. (Convert them to the same bitrate just unselecting the add copy protection option. All 'converted' files will appear in the Optimized Files folder. Back these up.) That will help you if for some reason you run into problems when restoring SonicStage's backup in the new computer. (I'd both backup the unprotected files as they are and use Sony's Backup Tool, just to be safe.) Now, the question of SS4 or CP. I think SS is a better software, but in my experience it doesn't optimize the database in the Walkmans, making navigation extremely slow. Changing pages in the Artist, Album or Song menu takes 2 or 3 seconds. CP makes navigation much faster. The problem is that the software is much more unstable. In my case, it, for instance, updated ArtistLink information for half of my tracks and now it just hangs when it tries to update the rest. Also, there's no possibility to edit the links, as in SS4. Still, I use CP to transfer tracks to the player, simply because I can't stand the slow navigation.

Pathetic, really. Sony should split the company to have the entertainment arm separated, so then maybe the electronics arm will return to its old glory. It's probably only protection concerns that's making the US version no-divx compatible. One question is, these things are region-specific, right? It would be nice to have a region-free version. After all, a portable DVD player would benefit from true portability.

I agree with the posts here. Ability to add to "now playing" would be a great function. At minimum, it should let you add a whole album to a bookmark, when pressing option while looking at the album list. It could also add remaining or total time to the main screen.