tsangc

Well, that's reassuring then. The native MP3 thing is really my only major beef with the NW-MS70D. Otherwise, the beautiful design (it's basically a MD remote with an extra lump on it) and materials make it nicer than your average cheapie MP3 player. If I had the ability, investigation of those DAT and playlist files with a hex editor might yield some info. That way we could make it show up in the playlist. That makes the assumption if fed the MP3 data, the hardware can play it back. But I don't know, there could be something more--like a specially placed configuration file, or some sort of binary firmware in the right directory. Maybe the unit has the hardware for MP3 playback, but needs some sort of firmware to be loaded first. Or, maybe not at all. There's also the possibility we're reading far into the words of some random marketing guy, who absent mindedly said "And we'll offer this on older units too!". And that leaves the MemoryStick walkmans as what they are, which is an MD player minus the MD transport and with a virtual flashdisk added. Calum

Note, I think we could have also made it transfer with a USB memory key or a ZIP drive too. I don't think the tool is detecting that the drive it's being run from is a Sony player. Calum

I couldn't get the installer to even dearc the files to my PC hard disk, but I copied the tool over manually by extracting the EXE archive in WinZip. I got it to copy, but same as you, I couldn't get it to play the files because they didn't appear in the playlist. I tried moving the DAT files (both the MPxxxx.DAT and PBLISTx.DAT) I guess we'll have to wait for Sony. Best case scenario is there's some unknown file format/directory structure which tells the player which files to play. Maybe it's just a matter of formatting those PBLIST files appropriately. Worst case scenario the device has no MP3 native firmware. Oh well. The NW-MS70D is a nice player, except it's proprietary in every way. Perversely proprietary: Everything from the memory format (MemoryStick, and at that MS Duo) to the file format. Hell, even the headphone connector has a weird adapter collet on it. Calum

So the tool runs off of the MemoryStick drive? Weird. I guess it means you can plug in the player into any PC without having to download and install custom software on that machine. Will try tonight when I get home--Thanks! Calum

I tried this software, and while I can't make heads or tails of what it says, it won't work with the Sony NW-MS70D I received as a gift recently. I can't seem to get past the step where you pick the drive which the Player mounts into Windows as. This package also appears to be an updater, not a full installer. Anyone know where to find the full package? Hopefully there is some sort of MP3 playback capability hidden in that little thing that is waiting to be unlocked by some random bits. Calum