Borat

SS 4.3 works well with my home premium laptop, so far...

Mostly 320k, some 256k.

Not sure about i) - ii), but, as memory serves: iii) it's (probably) best to keep the unit on the cradle when not in use as Li-Ion batteries prefer to be kept on full charge (and the battery drains when not in use anayway) iv) you should use square dimensions for your album art (re-sizing in ms-paint etc if necessary). Non square dimensions (eg. 250 x 230 pixels) will get truncated. About 300 x 300 pix is optimal in trems of resolution, although I think the art gets resized when transferred to the unit. v) Use track view - right click - properties - Lyric/Liner notes in sonicstage and copy/paste the lyrics as text (or an image file) into the box provided. Put carriage returns to split longer lines (>30 chars) to avoid having to horizontally scroll too much. Then transfer the songs back to the Vaio. You probably want to delete the non-text versions on the vaio first. The view lyrics function is on the left side of the right menu on th unit. Hope that helps.

You can convert all your ATRAC files in Sonicstage to other formats (MP3,Wav,FLAC etc) using Hi-MD rendererer, which can be downloaded at MDCF here. You need to register there first. It's a great program by the way, and the batch mode for a large collection works a treat.

SS works great for me too - never had any problems!

ID3 TagIt is a good, freeware tagging program. Handles various formats and can tag groups of files together...

Do you mean the actual folders created on your hard drive? This happens when you import tracks from an album at different times. You can get round this by highlighting all the tracks in the album (in Sonicstage) and using the move track function on the right -click menu to the original named folder (or one of your own choice). You can then delete the ...(1), ...(2) etc folders...

HD5 from that list, though though Vaio Pocket (40GB) would get my vote if it were there.

[Edited]

Well, you can't have everything - it's the only tool we have for this kind of thing, and it's totally free. Praise be to MarCNet! Anyway, glad to have helped Azureal, as you say the results aren't half bad, when transcoding from high bitrates at least...

Indeed, that's about the size of it - if you'll pardon the pun

Well, you'll be able to fit about twice the number of songs if you use half the bitrate, though the amount of physical storage space remains the same of course...

MarCNet's HiMDRenderer is the ideal tool for converting your Sonicstage Library to MP3 (or other formats). It's free (though you can donate to Marc) and you can get it here: http://forums.minidisc.org/index.php?showtopic=6087 The batch mode is especially useful for converting large collections .

192k ATRAC3Plus for squeezing everything onto the Vaio pocket 352k ATRAC3Plus for HiMD 132k ATRAC3 (LP2) for 'standard' MD

No SS won't do this automatically, but once installed it will ask you to scan for music files on your hard drive to import into SS. Just answer 'no' and you'll be alright.

Well, according to some on head-fi the ipod still plays MP3's with a gap, so I don't think I'll be buying one just yet, thanks.

How about removing the battery and replacing it after a minute or so - this should perform a reset and you should still have your tracks in the memory.

A graphic equaliser would be nice for enhanced playback. Better editing functions - particularly more accurate track dividing. Conversion to MP3 from ATRAC/Wav files. Track normalisation.

Same here - I'm a member of MDCF too. Having acquired a Sony Vaio pocket VGF AP1L, this seemed the ideal place to come to...

Isn't the procedure the same as for the A1000 and A3000 - have you tried that? Note that it only makes a difference with the European units...

Nope, mine's keeping good time. About 2 weeks since the last sync...

It would seem to be your unit's as both mine and my friend's E005's can fast forward and rewind perfectly well in shuffle mode.

Seems to take about as long as it ever did, not complaining though...

Well, you will indeed be using the internal amp (=headphone out) if line out isn't set. The external amp is also being used - if you set Sound in the menu on the unit to 'None' this will cancel any equaliser effects which are usually unwanted in this type of setup.

Hm, well, you must have a very sensitive amp then. So I guess you should forget line out, turn the sound on the A3000 to normal (instead of Equaliser) and set the volume to something low like 5-10 for example...