Ok, having read all the horror stories about the mess that Connect softare is I thought this might interest a lot of people. I am in the same boat as anyone else here. I bought the beautiful A3000, found it excellent, tries the connect software and a week on down the road the A3000 is still empty and next to useless. The first time I used Connect, it opened up and asked to import my library. I let it import about 1/3 of it -approx. 7000 tracks. It took over an hour and in the process it grew to over 250MB in memory, pushing my cache to the limits. When it eventually did get there, I tried to put some tracks on the A3000. I noticed that the actual device is really fast. In full speed it will transfer a 4 MB file in about a second. When it DID transfer it did so quickly. However, the program took ages to get the file to move to the transfer window, get it to send, etc etc. I tried the solution of using Sonicstage 3.4. Sure it works -just-, crashing and shutting down a lot when importing my library etc, but it eventually gets there. BUT: No top100 lists, no artist links, etc. I mean you get a piece of hardware for its features, and these are disabled by the software later on down the road?? Come on! So now what? Send the player back? No way! I absolutely love its looks, speed, sound quality, display. I am not going to let some software get in the way. So yesterday I tried to see what makes the Connect software work so slowly if at all. I did some reading on the web, found a few suggestions, put them all together and what do you know? They DO work, making connect player quite usable! Finally! It DOES work! First of all, the trick with connect is to know what you are dealing with. It is a flawed software, buggy and can get quite big, bogging down your PC. So when you use is it would be a good idea not to have too many other programs open. (Having said that, I have firefox with 5 tabs, outlook 2003, word 2003, itunes, avedesk, rk launcher, konfabulator with 14 widgets running and photoshop open, and connect works just fine. CS memory footprint is 90 MB now, and total CPU use is 20-25%) - Load time now is 30 seconds, where before it could take 3+ minutes and in the process bog down the PC almost to a halt. - Right now it is transferring some mp3s over and plays a track and the infamous Tinyhttp stands at about 80 MB. A lot by any other standards but for connect that quite good I think. The best part: It works like a charm! You have to see it to believe it!!! It opens folders quickly, imports a folder of 20 mp3s in 3-4 seconds, and drag/dropping is lightning fast!!! How fast? As soon you drag and drop a track to be transferred it is done before you can select the next one on the list. Solution/suggestions Note: You will have to delete your existing database in Connect Player (Your files are not affected ofcourse). I will describe what I did, and it would be a good idea to replicate my steps and see if you get the same good results. That way we may have found the solution to connect's problems. 1. Download the update 1.0.03.13130 from Sony's site and apply it. (reboot) 2. Go to the directory C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Sony Corporation\CONNECT Player and DELETE the folders Library and Data. These contain the database. When you delete it connect will start 'fresh'. 3. Right click on the connect shortcut icon and select Properties -> Compatibility -> Tick Run in compatibility for Windows 2000, apply, close. 4. Make sure you don't have too many programs open (as I said your mileage will vary, but why not help things?) 5. Run Connect. It should load up in about 30 seconds on a reasonably fast pc! If you followed the steps the library should be empty. 6. Now, the key to its horrendous behaviour is library size. When you import a big library (as I guess most of you lot have done), the connect really loses the plot, slows down and eventually becomes useless. That exact thing happened to me previously. So, do the following. In preferences do NOT set a watch folder, but rather add folders/files from the Open -> Import menus. Do NOT set it to import a folder with 50-100 subfolders, but rather choose the artists/albums you want in say 5 folders/per time, and let the program import them. When it imports files, cpu usage will rise to 90-100% so just let it do its thing. It should import 15-20 mp3s in 3-4 seconds. 7. Now that you have a couple of albums in the library (don't importing more that 5 albums for now), connect the A1000/3000 and open the transfer window. Drag a file over to transfer. It should be instantaneous. Now try importing a whole album. The WHOLE process in my pc for 12 tracks (from adding to finish) took 13 seconds, which essentially means that it transfers at full speed. Also CPU usage didn't exceed 70%. Conclusion So, have we found the solution to connect's hideous behaviour? I suspect it has to do with its database becoming too large. Since most of us have huge libraries of songs, it maybe that adding too many tracks was exactly the source of our problems. Please have a go at the solution I suggested and post your experiences. As I'm writing this I have casually added, transferred, edited and deleted several albums all using connect, without it ever slowing down or bogging my computer. Result!!
