bangraman

It's not so much a Vista issue as an A80x issue. A straight UMS file transfer of a 150Mb file takes 1 minute 45 seconds on the A808. It takes 29 seconds on the Cowon D2... ... In XP. And the D2 is definitely not the fastest-transferring 'real' USB2.0 MP3 player out there. And an update - on Vista Business 32 on another PC (a laptop), its 1 minute 47 seconds and 32 seconds respectively. Chronicstage definitely adds it's own delay, but in this case it's just adding a minor insult to major injury. After even going to the length of building a purpose-specific PC to sync Sony devices and suffering with Chronicstage, I finally had enough of all the hoops that are placed in your way by Sony because of incompetence and a general lack of smelling the coffee. I'm keeping the A808 purely as a mini iPod-format video podcast player (since I can't be bothered to transcode them for the D2) only until the new iPods turn up, and the RH1 just in case. Everything else has already been given the boot, and the purpose built Chronicstation has had Chronicstage exorcised from it recently. Good riddance to (good looking) bad rubbish which also doesn't deliver in the sound quality (i.e. not how much bass it produces) stakes. I'll return to the Sony fold when... or if... they ever get their act together.

Among the other issues listed, Chronicstage also has problems with larger libraries. I accidentally came upon this by trying to figure out why some forum members had no problems and why others (like me) had terminal problems. The upshot of that was that Chronicstage can only successfully manage around 8,000 tracks before performance starts rapidly tailing off. I'd first check that you don't have more than this, then work with other possibilities.

Just wondering if this would make Chronic go any faster for larger libraries.

I don't think so - at least, not in the case of the iPod. They have enough flexibility in their players to be a viable proposition even along with an MP3-phone (especially one not made by Apple) in a way that for example a Sony player isn't.

No they don't. Sole reason that the EX90's are total deal-killers for me is the lack of any isolation. Other than that, a pretty decent sounding pair of in-ears and I found them extremely comfortable.

Yes.

Well, I have some sort of resolution to my issues. Thanks to a couple of posters on Head-Fi, who I worked out had similar library sizes, I figured out the maximum practical library size of Chronicstage. It's about 8,000 tracks, which at a typical 160-192K ends up about 40Gb. Having thrown in different bitrates, it's clearly the number of tracks that is the issue, not their sizes. Below this level, I have to say Chronicstage is not so Chronic - if you disregard it's inherently inelegant and rudimentary nature - and does what little it does quite smoothly, provided you don't have other compatibility issues. Other compatibility issues included additional codecs and media splitters being present on your system, but those issues are already covered and known. I'm not sure if the ~8K track soft limit (by soft limit, I mean that Chronic will continue to work beyond this point but gets slower and slower) has been discussed before, but this is my finding so far. I'm now assuming everyone who has no major issues basically has less than 700 or so albums in their Chronicstage implementation. The count may be tied to your disk / processing power too, so I am not 100% sure that the ~8K limit applies to everyone else. Library management in Chronic is still unwieldy though, so I would hesitate to call this beyond 'barely usable' as far as the industry state of the art is concerned. However I have now discovered that the terminal slowdowns are avoidable, which is good news.

Some updates: The 8800GTX has been replaced by a 7900GS. Much more stable in sleeping. In fact, I'd probably say fully stable as I've not had a display-related issue since putting in the 7900. Clearly overkill was a bad idea. I did not install the X-Fi, but rather have put a spare Fireface 800 on here for the occasions that I may want to listen directly from this PC. Once again, seemingly no driver issues. The prognosis for general everyday usage: Very slow. This is with a 14,000 track library, a subset of my main library. I can imagine that if I put my full library on here, Chronic will probably choke. iTunes and j.River have no issues with my main library but that's beside the point at this stage. The slowness is not so much in the library listing, it's the pauses between doing anything at all that gets me. Significantly less than the Dells I had it running on for sure, but just the accumulation of these pauses when navigating folders, loading the player, unloading it, etc is really starting to get to me at the moment. I'm a bit incredulous of comments made in forums saying they're perfectly happy with this kind of response. For MD users it's unsurprising since the speed of their transport has to catch up with even Chronic, but for flash/HDD player users who have apparently used other machines, I find it hard to believe that this is acceptable if you have more than a handful of albums in your library and you refresh them on a regular basis. If anyone has speeding up tips, please post'em.

My vote is for the A80x. There's more subtle detailing in the design over the boringly 'old Sony' HD1/3 and the cool looks extend to the UI as well as the casing.

There have been some bulbously ugly MD's from Sony, but I don't think there's been anything NW which I've hated in terms of how they looked. Even the Bean. The HD1/2 were the most silly to use though.

Er... my view seems to have gone all weird, I can't see the replies....?!? Right, if anyone's answered this before sorry for the dupe, but for one of the easiest solutions you can use Autoplay Repair (http://www-stud.uni-essen.de/~sddabacz/prog.php?id=apr) which will allow you to add to the Autoplay dialog.

No. Unless he uses Boot Camp / Parallels to run Chronicsh*tage which will be pretty painful, especially so for a Mac user.

Not 100% sure about this but does Image Converter need additional codecs to translate iPod Video podcasts? I could swear that stuff I could transfer on my non-Chronicstation to the A808 now can't be transferred. Specifically, the dl.tv podcast using the iPod Video/PSP feed. EDIT: July 1st 07: I'll answer this myself. The answer is yes. Absolutely moronic then that they don't bundle Quicktime or a Windows codec for codecs that are supported natively on the A80x with the Chronicstage disc. Just... morons.

What, just like you had inside info to get the beta gapless firmware for the Zen Vision M? Bwahahaha, happy Photoshopping On a related note to this thread, I think I should have a countdown thread: "Countdown to bangraman having a Chronicstage-induced aneurism". This is the first time I've seriously used Chronic day in, day out in about two years and it really is still a remarkably crappy piece of software. The one thing it really succeeds in is to kill off a significant percentage of the musical enjoyment to be had resulting from the convenience of having your music digitally and centrally stored. However, it is helping my diet as I'm sick of doughnuts, seeing it all the time on Vista + Chronic.

I'm curious where you get all this from.