Beethovenian

Good post, Lamewing. I think your arguments are all very good, and indeed I would consider the iPod a better choice for the majority of people, even though I see it as way overhyped and dislike all the "cool" factor people see in it (how can something everybody has be cool?). So why do I buy a Sony Walkman? The answer is simply gapless playback. I understand many people don't listen to music that requires a continuous flow between tracks, and when they do a little pause may not be annoying enough. But for me lack of gapless simply cancels any advantage a player may have. I'm a big fan of classical music, and my collection of "gapless" CDs alone is very likely bigger than the whole musical collection of most people (currently I have around 400 CDs that include some gapless transitions). True, some transitions are not that hurt by a brief pause (though the iPod has a more than acceptable one for my taste), but others are: it's ridiculous to break the tension buildup Beethoven creates for the triumphant finale in his Fifth Symphony, as is to stop the dancing flow of Stravinsky's Petrushka, or to interrupt the passionate duet of Tristan and Isolde in Wagner's opera. Some years ago I could be more tolerant with lack of gapless, and even think of concatenation of files as a somewhat acceptable way around (though how can you find the aria you want in an opera when everything is just a whole big track? And how do you know which song is playing if all you can see is the album name?). But it's been years, Apple has even brought its format to the table, lots of people have complained, and nothing happened. It became simply unacceptable to me. Lack of gapless brings back problems that existed during the 78s era, what are they doing here, in the 21st century? I know that doesn't excuse Sony of its bad software. But I have to confess software flaws don't bother me nearly as much, because somehow I always managed to survive them, and they were in a way or another fixed. Indeed, in many aspects I like SonicStage. Bear in mind I'm a classical music fan. I tend to listen to albums, not songs. I don't like iTunes's interface, very oriented to pop music and individual song listening. I don't care for playlisting, shuffles and all those things. And I don't mind copy protection, though I agree Sony does it in a very cumbersome way. In fact, I'm against music piracy. Being a fan of a genre that is strugling to survive, I think I have to do what I can to support musicians. So I buy CDs, go to concerts, donate to music organizations. That's it. I could add that I wouldn't like to have the player everybody has (which is true), but that wouldn't deter me from buying an iPod over a Walkman. I just happen to mind the gap.

You're not. It's ridiculous, but even the manual says that while you can have gapless playback on the Walkman, you can't with Connect Player. Can't you choose the parameters you want for folder creation? I think you can. You can define how you want the folders to be named and how many nested folders to have.

Good summary, NoOneHome. I also noticed that if you add any info in SonicStage to the liner notes field, it will show as an unreadable mess in Connect. I suppose the same would apply to the lyrics field.

Nice. I'm still debating if I'm going to get the A3000 when it comes out in the US. It seems nice (I like the way you can navigate to the track and from the track), but I definitely need more capacity. So far I have more than 40GB of music encoded in Atrac. One question: can you navigate from bottom to top as in previous HDs? I mean, if you go to a list, can you still push up and start browsing with the last item, even if you're on one of those index lists (the ones that show under a letter)?

I was seeing pictures of the new iPod and it indeed handily beats the new Walkmans in terms of displaying track titles. Surprising, since the old iPods didn't display so many characters, and their screen wasn't so much smaller. I would actually prefer smaller fonts and more information to bigger fonts. Still, the iPod wastes screen when showing the Now Playing information. They should give you at least genre, and preferably composer as well, besides artist, album and track title. My HD1 certainly doesn't go up to the Windows limit of 255 characters. It's much less than that.

What are the songs it comes with? And are you still buying the 20GB model?

I have a few albums with very long track names (they're all classical music), and it's not easy to abbreviate them. So if length is not an issue, I'd prefer to leave them as they are. Also, I think there's no reason anymore to have low limit lenghts as before.

One more question: Is there a limit number of characters for any title? I'm not sure the limit in the HD series (40 characters?), but I know at one point longer titles will be cut. Would you happen to have big titles that could test this? Of course, it will be a rare occurrence, but I just would like to know if the few very long-titled tracks I have would have to be edited prior to transfer.

Great, Xispe, thanks for all the effort. Hope it works.

Xispe, when you released the first version, that didn't allow importing tracks yet, I tested it with my all-Atrac HD1 and it showed all tracks in the browser, plus showed the specific name the files took inside the player. I could then locate the file using Windows Explorer and copy it and play it back on my PC. All tag information was there. I was wondering if it's not possible to try something in that line for the Atrac files. Just a method of renaming the files and removing them from the player, without further modification. Does that make sense?

Thanks. This player's interface is looking more and more attractive. If they just had a higher capacity version... I also wonder why they add lots of tagging options in the Connect Player, like Album Artist, if they don't make use of them in the player. It was about time somebody did it. (Or Sony should at least have a browse by composer option, since gapless playback make it a good alternative for classical music fans.)

Thanks, Tetsugaku-San. Just to confirm then: Do the names of artist, album and genre scroll when you're on the now playing screen and use the up-down buttons to select them (to use them as starting points for browsing), in case they're too long to fit? I'm asking again because you mentioned only track title, and I'm not sure I had expressed myself correctly.

I know what you mean, EZero. I would immediately buy this one if it had a 40GB, or at least 30GB version (not that I'm buying an iPod instead; that won't happen unless they solve the gapless issue, which seems never). I also would prefer a colour screen, or at least a higher resolution one. Fonts are still very pixelated. Tetsugaku-san, very nice review, thanks. Now a few questions: - Is there any lag when accessing the menu or jumping to the next track? Kurisu here said there isn't, and Ascariss mentioned he thought it was instantaneous, but both the AVWatch and the MP3generation reviews mention a lag, as was the case with the previous Network Walkmans. - What are the track details showed when you access that in the option menu? Is it just bitrate, format, or is there more from tags (like composer, album artist etc.). - When you're in the current playing screen and select album title or artist, does it scroll the name, or it's only for browsing from those characteristics?

This is for the new Walkman owners. What is the Artist tag info used by the A series when you're browsing your music? Connect now adds lots of new tag fields, and one of them is the Album artist. It would be great if the players supported both Album Artist and Artist, so you could have compilations show both under a generic artist description or a specific one for each track. But I suppose that doesn't happen. Which one, then, is used?

The HD1 seems to be the only one Sony really announced in the US. I don't know at what prices Sony is considering putting the A series here. They're selling the HD5 for $279. That's the maximum I can think of for the A3000, and even that is a stretch, since the iPod offers 10GB more and video support for only $20 extra. Maybe that's also a reason for them to not advertise the new Walkman? They would probably not lower the price that much to be really competitive with the iPod.

Sony seems to have given up the US market for now. Maybe they realized they can't really compete with the iPod and are waiting for a big success in other regions before launching an all-out attack? They launched the HD5 very silently here. I expect the A series to follow a similar path and show up in some stores unnanounced. Considering SonyStyle is selling only the black and red versions of the HD5, it seems they're already getting rid of their stock and preparing for something new. I just wished they had a 40GB, or at least 30GB, version. Then I'd upgrade.

Curiously, the manual doesn't state that the custom EQ applies only to Atrac files. I have the impression Chris said that to be the case. By the way, based on the manual, these players may well have the best navigating interface around. It seems really well thought-out.

From what I could grasp reading a report on this, Net K2 is not a compression, but a decompression technology. It in some way decode Atrac or AAC or WMA files "restoring" what was lost during encoding. I suppose they use the standards of each codec to guess what would have been eliminated during compression. It's an interesting concept. Don't know if they'll only use it with their MP3 players.

I don't see the option either. No conversion, and no transfer options either (I don't know if that appears only when you have a compatible player connected).

OK, now I have toyed a little with this player and can give my initial impressions. Connect Player by default doesn't add copy protection, so that's something nice. But that's basically all I can say of positive about it (well, I actually liked the fact it supports metadata for conductor, orchestra, singer, even things like mood). For the rest, it's a huge disappointment, a software to make me thing SonicStage is great. Of course, many of the stability and resource usage problems may be due to a bad installation. But the player seems very capricious when scanning folders, is slow in general and takes forever to shut itself down (it closes, but you hear the hard-drive spinning for a long time after that, and it doesn't let you open SonicStage until it has completely closed). Again, that may be due to installation problems, since we're not supposed to use this software anyway. The biggest problem is that Connect is many steps backwards from SonicStage in the interface department. I like in general how it organizes things on the main window, but some controls are weird. For instance, if you select a track, it will first let you edit its title, instead of playing it. You need to click twice to have it played, but the first time gives you the editing option, which may very well confuse you. Editing the metadata is a nightmare compared to SonicStage. By the way, let me say that SonicStage is one of the very best software players to edit track information I know. Certainly better than iTunes. Connect doesn't let me edit a whole album information or artist, doesn't let me go track by track by simply pressing the down button after editing one track, doesn't let me add album art for a whole album at once. Everything seems to require opening a popup properties window for individual tracks (in SonicStage, I simply select an album art in Windows Explorer and drag it to the album I want; in Connect I have to do it using the "add album art" function in properties). Worse still, the properties popup doesn't have "next" and "back" buttons that facilitate editing a sequence of tracks, as SonicStage has. And when you insert a CD, instead of simply adding track information from CDDB to the tracks listed, it displays the CDDB popup, even if there's only one set of information for that album. By the way, Connect keeps accessing the CDDB database periodically, regardless of having or no a new CD in the drive. And now the most ridiculous thing: Connect is not gapless. Tracks it rips continue to be gapless if encoded with Atrac, but you'll need SonicStage to confirm it. The albums ripped with SonicStage that I imported to Connect played with very noticeable gaps during transitions.

One thing I notice that's nice for classical music lovers (though maybe useless since there's no hardware support) is that Connect adds separate tags for lots of things, including conductor, orchestra, singer etc.

It doesn't work for me. It seems to install fine, creating directory and icons (though it doesn't ask me to reboot), but when I try to launch it, it just hangs on a blank screen. If I close it and try again, it doesn't do anything, even after reboot. As for the language pack, it seems to install manual and help files. Never mind, I saw Castar's post in the AVforums and it works now. What I didn't do was to run ConfigSet.exe before installing.

Shadow, did you get the Microsoft Passport thing?

Great work! Does it present you the save option only if you have MP3s? My Atrac files show correctly in the HD1, names and everything, but I don't see the Save button. It would be nice if it worked with Atrac as well, but even if not, that's already fabulous work.

I hope Sony decides to release an A3200 as well, with at least 30GB, preferably 40, to better compete with the iPod 30GB. Selling the A3000 for $299 (as it seems to be the case) will not work.