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Understood - thank you very much Stuge

Sony now offers only the updater to Connect 1.0.04. This requires a previous Connect version to install over. But I deleted previous Connect software because it was sooooo bad. The obvious answer is to install Connect from CD but I can't find it - I bought my NWA1000 four months ago. And it seems impossible now to download the original Connect software - thanks Sony!

I have the NV-A1000 but the software issues are the same. It is possible (although unpleasant) to use Sonicstage 3.4 to load your music onto the player. If you are a power user you obviously need other software as well. Here's what I did: (1) Rip all my CDs to MP3 using EAC and Lame --alt-preset standard (2) Copy all music intended for the Sony player to a new folder on a different PC harddrive (3) Use foobar2000 masstagger system to give all files consistent tags (time-consuming, and you need to know foobar2000) (a) set album names as Artist: Album ( on various artists albums, set track names as ## - Artist: Track and set Artist to be the same for the whole album (4) Import that folder (no others) into SonicStage3.4 (5) In SonicStage, check the 'Compilation' checkbox on any albums which are still compilations/Various Artists (laborious and time-consuming - you have to do this track by track, three mouse-clicks per track) (6) Initialise the player's hard disk (from the player's Options menu) to wipe it - note, this will reset all your options to factory defaults. (7) Use SonicStage to transfer your music to the (now empty) player Step (7) is fairly quick - took about 10 minutes to transfer 5.1GB, and anyhow you need the player to be connected to the PC for much longer than that to recharge it. Do not use SonicStage to edit or delete multiple files from its own library, it goes through track by track and takes an hour or more - better to uninstall SonicStage and reinstall it. Do not use SonicStage to edit tags, convert music etc (unless converting to the Atrac format) Do not use SonicStage to delete music that is already on your player - either use the player's own Trash function, or just re-initialise the player's hard drive each time. It really is unbelievable how much Sony's software stinks. The important thing is not to try to use the software to do any operations to multiple tracks at the same time.

Here is another problem, which can also be a potentially neat trick: I've discovered that the player limits the album length to 60 characters. So if you have two albums with the same first 60 characters, e.g. Very-Long-album-name-mentioning-soloists-and-remastering (Disc 1) Very-Long-album-name-mentioning-soloists-and-remastering (Disc 2) then the player thinks those are the same album, and all the songs on those two albums (treated as a single album by the player) will be played in alphabetical order. For example if the tracks are named Disc 1 01-A song on disc 1 02-Another cool song on disc 1 .... Disc 2 01-Great tune on disc 2 02-More good music on disc 2 .... then the player will play the tracks in this order: 01-A song on disc 1 01-Great tune on disc 2 02-Another cool song on disc 1 02-More good music on disc 2 To avoid this problem you need to keep album names to less than 60 characters. Alternatively you can exploit it so that the player will play through the whole of Disc 1 and Disc 2 as a single album. Keep the album names over 60 characters with the first 60 characters the same (adding spaces or details before "Disc 1/2" if you need to). Name the tracks so that they will always be in the right order even when the albums are 'merged' by the player. For example you could use track numbering 101, 102 ... on Disc 1 and 201, 202 ... on Disc 2. This can be especially nice for audiobooks etc which span several discs. It does not have to be used for multi-disk albums, it could also be used for other albums which you would always want to play in a fixed order.

A workaround (sort of) to search for Album by Genre: 1) Through Genre, choose one song which you know is from the album you want 2) Once that song is playing, hit Option and choose 'Go to Album' 3) Wait a little (...Accessing...) then hit play to play that whole album from the beginning Not very good I know - but I think the 'Go to Artist' and 'Go to Album' features on the NW-A3000/1000 are nice, this is not something found on my wife's 30GB iPod. - A workaround to Shuffle Play Albums 1) Make genre playlists of your albums. 2) Use shuffle play within the playlist you want - unfortunately of course it will start playing any random track, not the first track of the album, although you can fix that if you want using steps (2) and (3) above 3) Once the playlist is playing, use the Option key, scroll down to play mode, and change to 'normal'. Again quite a lot of button pressing, but it does work quite well. (It is not ideal because once the playlist is playing then it plays in a fixed order, to make it shuffle again after the first album is finished you would need to go back to the play mode options and switch on shuffle mode again). Even so, I do think the ability to change play mode while a song continues playing is a nice feature.

Sennheiser PMX60 Neckband 'sport' headphones, extremely comfortable on the ears, excellent audiophile phones for the price and not just for sport purposes - around $20-$30. These are very open headphones, meaning you can easily hear what is going on around you - so good for outdoor activities where you still need to be able to hear oncoming traffic, eg walking, jogging, skating, skiing etc. Not good for air travel, etc where there is a lot of background noise. Long cable. AKG K271 Large DJ-style supra-aural headphones. Very comforable with soft cushions, not too much pressure to the side of the head. Outstanding audiophile headphones across the whole audio spectrum. Blocks quite a lot of external noise so good for noisy backgrounds etc. One issue: Like many supra-aural headphones, the seal with the head is so tight that in a warm environment it can make your ears sweat.

If you are customising SS, do you also have a customised Windows? I use a custom theme in Windows XP, nothing elaborate just 'Reluna' from Neowin.net applied using uxtheme.dll. The problem is that it crashes SonicStage when you open the application - just a flickery menu bar is visible but the application will not open properly. Seems SonicStage will only run using default Windows XP themes. It could be something simple like the font that is used for menus, I will do some experiments with minor changes to the theme if I have the time, but for me this makes SonicStage buggy software. It is the only app of hundreds on my PC that is unable to work within a custom Windows theme.