dutchtrance

well the whole 16 gig debarcle and the price has really annoyed me. saturday i saw a w960 in the window of manchester EX for 200 pounds and i decided to get that and some blue tooth headphones. i will be trading in my w880 and A818 in for it. the bluetooth heaphones i got are the sony over the ear 21g. so far i really like it! so some thoughts on bluetooth audio. once the headphones are paired they automaticly connect which is good. they also do the same with the play station 3. the headphones have controls for the volume and stop/play/ffwd/rew on a rockr switch. there is also a button for answering calls as it works as a headset to. the sound quality is suprsingly good! i haveuse the bundle headphones with the s706, eytimonic e6i, and the bundled headphones fr my 818 and in all cases the sound is as good as those. the ear phone reciever must e on the right of the 2 ear cups as if i have the phone on my left side i have skips, but have it on my right side, back pocket, side pocket, under a coat, and it works fine! ps the eq does work on these headphones but i think that depend on the sending hardware.

its so silly. i dont know why sony behave like this. i would have bought a 16 gig for the right price but they have just priced them selves out the markt. i mean 170 quid for an 8 gig player? come on! you can pick up the 818 now for about 100 pounds. a bit less if you shop around. the people who will buy this product are people like us. once the rpice drops to near ipod levels, joe public in the street will pick one up so at the moment sony are aiming at us. since most of us will already have an 818/816, why would we upgrade/sidegrade to the same player, with only bluetooth added for an extra 75 quid? sure if i was doubling my capacity, but not for the same sized player. oh dear oh dear. i am so annoyed. when this drops to 100 pounds towards the end of the year, then i may concider it depending on wether i bought some thing else in the mean time.

sony style have updated their site. the 16 gig has been removed. the 8 gig is shipping with the bluetooth 21g headphones bundled for 175 pounds. what stupid nonesense, no 16 gig. how utterly utterly stupid. sony just lost one customer right here.

if sony pirice themselves at 230 quid then they will go head to head with this. http://www.advancedmp3players.co.uk/shop/P...layer.2026.html its all the features of the sony and then some, and comes in not 8, not 16, not 32 but 60 gig. it has mpeg 4 video in reording on the unit, 4.3 inch screen, bluetooth AND support for every video and audio codec going. finally it has 16mw wolfsen dac output. thats pretty trasty package. sony has got real problems.

this is so silly. why do sony do this? here they have a plaer that a lot of people want and they price it to compete with the ipod touch, but without half the features. sure the sq is better, but joe bloggs in the street does not care about that. i tinhk i`ve now had enough and wil be buying another player from iriver. sony best do something special with the pricing of these units.

if its in jap then its useless. i want it in english. bloody sony. why not just include noise cancelling and line in recording? hopefully there is a world wide model and that has english. and i wanted to use media manager as sonic stage STILL does not read AAC/M4A/MP4 tags and i am NOT re taggng over 10,000 tracks! media manager does read ACC tags correctly.

Hi. looks like i am going to get a jap model as i really want the noise cancelling and the line in record (without the cradle). this means i am going back to sonic stage, but i noticed the player says it supports media manager? i tried my s706 with media manager and it does not work, it say connect a walk man, which i do but it never detects it. am i right in thinking the player will work with media manager? can i import it and use it on a UK machine? will it display english in the menus? do they do a world wide model?

ok, heres the way i read it. can some one confimr these points if they know? 1) the 820 is a derivative of the jap 919 player sans the dbt video reciever. 2) for sound quality and chipsets, it is more akin to the 919. this is important as sound quality is very important after being totally underwhelmed by the sony phones sound quality. i dont want the 820 to turn out to be a sony phone style chipset! 3) the 820 in japan has atrac and uses sonic stage. 4) the uk/us models lose atrac but gain drag and drop. 5) the uk/us models lose noise cancelling. 6) the uk/us models lose line in recording which is listed on the jap site as it says it records in atrac and the transferes back are via sonicstage an uk/us models do not do sonicstage/atrac. 7) both the US/Uk and jap models have bluetooth. 8) transferes to and from are still via the wm port and connot be done over the air via bluetooth 9) us/uk units will not be gapless as there is no TOC written to allow this see my earlier theroies on this) 10) video in recording is retained in all terratories but only possible via the base unit. 11) line in recording can/cannot be possible via the base unit (does any one know?) 12) how would noise cancelling work with a blue tooth headphone? thanks in advance. i am very excited by this player and LOVE drag and drop, but i will have to give up line in recording ( important for me as i record my dj sets) and noise cancelling if i want to keep that feature. its a tough choice! since audio quality is a concern for me, i am very worried about the bluetooth headsets re encoding to trans mit over bluetooth. i mean bluetooth headphones cannot decode wav, aac, wma etc and bluetooth does not offer enough bandwidth for a wav signal to be sent so it must be re encoding and already compressed AAc/WMA file to transmit within the 400kbs or so bandwdth offered by bluetooth. thanks again for any help!

my unit`s (818) firmware says version 1.00. is the latest firmware 2.10? how come theres no download links for it on the sony page?

ok then, i am thinking of sending this to sony as my thoughts on the software, but i heard a few of them read this forum so thought they might pick up on them here so here goes! firstly, i like the software. its very simple and elegant in what it does. it is tasked with transfereing and managing photos and music and other media to and from all sony devices, and it does this well. there is no sillyness in it like sonic stage that forces you to re evaluate the way you have to work and it just does the job the way most people want it and expect it to0. it look realy nice and fits in well with vista. i tunes looks a little stale and sonicstage looks plasticy. this looks like a modern piece of software. it used folders for its file management which is what people want. i personally prefer using tags, but i understand that joe bloggs in the street will be fustrated that when he renames a file as `spice girls - 2 become 1` and sonic stage picks it up as `unknown artist - unknown track` he may be annoyed. it just works with little fuss and does the job. all good. i like the way it moitors the cards and devices i have and if i have a new album, i can sellect that album, select that device (even when its not plugged in ) and remove a few older albums and transfere the new one across. when the media manager detects that the device has been connected, it will make the changes. brilliant! now the problems, and would it be a piece of sony software if it did not have some problems built in as added features? course not! firstly, i maintan 2 seperate music folders. one is the one i use for sonic stage. they are amixture of m4a, mainly MP3 and a few wavs. this is my main music collection and i use this with my psp/s706. a second folder i a,m building up which has all my cds, re ripped to m4a he-aac 96kbps. There is also a third folder that i have inside the sonicstage music folder which has all of my weekly radio shows in such as a state of trance, corstens countdown etc. the way media managaer works, you create a shortcut to a folder and the software then shows this at the side. it took me about 4-5 goes to get this setup but i think its some thing they need to make people aware of. if you delete the default shortcuts (such as to itunes and windows sample music ), which i never use any way AND delete the parent `music` folder they are linked to in the shortcuts; any folders you add from then on will ALL merge into one folder. for exmaple, i would remove the links to all the shortcuts, leaving me with a blank shortcut window. if i then add a link to my m4a collection, it adds it fine. if i then add a shortcut to my live sets folder it ADDs them under the m4a folder as individual files. not in the folders. same if i add a shortcut to a mp3 folder i do not have as m4a, it adds the files individually , with out a folder, mixed up, in the m4a folder. this means you can only have one master folder and any other folders not physically underneath the master folder are added in as lose mp3s. the way around this seems to be to only remove the itunes links and add the m4a/liveset folder under the original music folder (its confusing i know, but it tok me ages to figure it out). this is not natural way of thinking. suggestion: when you add a shortcut, it should be displayed as a folder! not as individual files. next. media manager will refuse to accept any files it cannot understand. this is fine. you would not expect it to read real media files or ape files. the problem is that if you have a 6 gig mp3 folder (like i have) and you import it to media manager, if even one of those files has some ting in it that media manager does not like, it will not import the folder. in my case i bought a hard to find album via i tunes and using fair tunes converted it to plain mp4 files. media manager does not like these files (even though they are now un-encrip(led)ted) and will refuse to import the whole libary. again i have the patience and forethought to import one folder at a time to find the problem and remove it to allow media manager to import the master folder, but joe bloggs will not and he will just give up. suggestion: have media manager say when it cannot import some thing instead of just crashing out and freezing with no explaination. next, transfereing. now that media manager is working in folder mode you`d expect the transferes to work in folder mode as well, but they do not. i organise my files as masterfolder->artist->album->tracks. now when i import an master folder to media player, i expect when i sellect an album i ccan transfer the folder to the player but you canot. i expect that if i wanted all of rob dougans albums on the player, i can sellect the rob dougan artist folder with all his albums underneath and transfere that, but you cannot. what you have to do instead is open up each and every album, sellect all the individual tracks and copy them across. if we talk about some one like archive who have about 7 albums, this is extremely time consuming and silly. suggestion: allow transfereing of folders in media manager, not just individual tracks! and finally, my biggest gripe of them all.when i transfere the m4a files, i do this by opening the artist folder, then the album/disc i want, then the playlist and transfere that. media manager is clever enough to seek out the files in the playlist and shunt them across as well as the play list. heres where it goes wrong: it takes all the individual files and REGARDLES of the folder they were originally in it creates a new folder for each TRACK artist and shoves the individual files in there. the problem with this is that you lost al of your files organisation. if you transfere across 3 albums of a compilation, you end up with 100+folders; one for EACH of the diferent track atists AND a seperate play list. why? thats just silly because it makes deleteing an album you no longer listen to impossible to delete. how am i supposed to know which individual folder of track artists has the files in from the compilation i want to remove? am i expected to look up the tracklist, find one folder for each of the artists on that disc and open that up and check if the files inside are one of the ones from my disc or if its from another disc? if media player is clever enough to know which tracks need to be transfered across when i transfere a playlist, why is it not clever enough to do this when i delete a play list? suggestion: either offer the user a choice of transfereing via individual artists folders per track or to transfere as album folder mode. dont ask this each time, have it as an option in the options menu. alternativly, when you delete a playlist, have the media manager delete the files associated with the paly list! simple. now for some smaller gripes. i dont mind if these are not fixed as hey are a price of simple software, but just something to bear inmind. it would be nice to show the album art on the folder icons, like sonic stage does as opposed to a row of plan boring folder icons. it would be nice if it could make use of tags where it found them. maybe a tag/folderview option. it would be nice of the folder columns could be customised, for exmaple, allowing column to be removed or added, such as album removed (i know what album it is, can see that in the folder view!) and date modified added if the user wanted it. oh and if it would wash the dishes and solve world hunger, that would be nice too. sorry for the long post, hope some one at sony reads it and takes note.

i must disagree. i like the software but i cannot use it as it simply will NOT import my libary. it just freezes after 3-4 songs of `creating a search index`. its not useable if i cannot import my music to it! there are other problems too. the album art is not displayed in the album view. now i spend a lot of time ensuring my music libary is organised and tagged correctly, all for nothing if this program ignores album art. things i do like - all in one media manager all in one software for all my sony devices looks good runs well. sort out the search index bug and the option to display the album art and i am happy.

not too good as it only has a 7600GS as for games i use a wii-sixty. for info its one of the `famous` pentium 816D (133*20) that you just mount in a good motherboard (Gigabyte DS3p rev 3.3) and dail in 200mhz Fsb to get your self a 4ghz dual core. i just backed it up with 4 sticks of 1gig DDR2 800mhz ram. but thats besides the point. i tinhk media manager might actually be broke as when ever i import a track or filder it seems to be for ever `creating a search index`, no mater how small the folder i import into it is.

right then, some quick opinions on it. the registration is not bad, its just entering a name and address. you can enter any thing you want, but i put my real details down as i do intend to use this product. it seems to work fine with the w880i. it picks it up in usb mode and displays all the pictures and music correctly. it looks very nice, though a little cramped in places. it runs very nice, i have not experienced any slowness on my 4hgz p4 with 4 gig of ram on a raptor drive. i like how it intergrates everything together, pictures, music etc. bad points. when i imported my 5 gig music collection in mp3 half an hour ago it is STILL creating a search index and using one of my cpu cores fully to do this. there does not seem to be any albu, art work on display

well i downloaded the pc suite, but it does not have the media manager in it. i do have a w880i so i was going to test it with that. do you have a download link for a copy of media manager?

As far as i can tell atrac is a containerless format, as in it is just a raw audio file. the reason atrac does not work in the 81* series is windows media player doe snot write a table of contents which atrac requires. therefore if sonic stage is supported then so is atrac as sonic stage will write a TOC. i predict this unit will be released here minus the TV support and minus sonic stage support and there fore atrac. it would be a shame to have to import from japan and get the TV bit not working as i presume it will be tied to japanise TV systems freq.

that is imply perfect. really. if i had to design the perfect walkman i would design that. Atrac Yep Direct encoding yep video Yep sexy look Yep Sonicstage support Yep noise cancelling yep its simply perfect! though if i was nit picking, it could do without the buttons and a touch screen, but its still gourgeous! does it really do TV tuning as well? i really really really want this player. its going to be hard to resist sony usual tactic of selling it at 200 quid then knocking the price down to 100 quid 2 months later.

thanks for that, but do you know an where that still does the deal of the free speakes with the player/

hey guys, i am interested in getting an 80* as the atrac support for me is a deal breaker so i ned to get one now, rather than later as the new units will not support it! question is where still does the speaker offer? i know some stores did them with the nice network speaker system, which i would really like. is this available any where still?

as we all know, sonicstage works via tags and not via the filenames/folders. this is fine and a good way of working. the problem is that the metods of editing these tags is conveluted and flawed in 3 ways. 1) sonicstage does not alow mass editing of tags. this means that if you wanted to change the artist or an attribute on multiple tracks (say a compilation of tracks where the artist is not the same but the album they belong to is) sonicstage does not alow you to do this, which leads me onto the second point 2) Sonicstage does not support the popular tag formats. this is a massive problem as if sonicstage suported the popular tag formats we could edit the tags in another program, set up albums and attributes the way we wanted then have sonicstage import them and catalogue evrything correctly, negating the need to use sonicstage`s taggin system. as sonicstage does not support apples taggin system or the most populat taging systems (it even uses a non-standard method of taging inside its own 3gp container) it makes reading in files a no-go. also, the tags it writes are not supported by other programs meaning they canot be edited outside of sonicstage. 3) sonicstage does not tag properly and still uses a DB for tagging. forexample, it stores which tracks are part of a compilation via the DB and not in the files tags. this means re importing a track results in it forgeting its own settings. since ID3v2 alows creation of its own tags, why can sonicstage not write its own marker and rember this? these 3 problems are the main problems with sonicstage, crashing bugs aside. they must be fixed to make sonicstage work correctly. that is my complaint.

i do not know if this is of any use to any one but.... when i re install vista/xp i have my mp3 collection which i re import to sonicstage. normally its a ball ache as i have a lot of mix albums which have different artist for the tracks but belong to one album or compilation. sonic stage imports these as individual tracks with different artists but the same album. its a pain to have to re edit every single one of my 3000+ tracks. usually i would have to go through each ttrack, tick the `compilation album` tick box to group the album tracks together, then imput the correct album artist ( mixed by marcel woods for example) for each album. i found this way of doing it which is a bit quicker. firstly, make sure all the mp3 files from the same album are tagged with the same album. for example, all `high contrast presents marcel woods (disc1)` album tracks have the same album name assigned to them and vice versa with `high contrast presents marcel woods (disc2)` i just import my libary at this point via folder import. open sonic stage and switch to `view all tracks` on the left hand side. click the top most track once, hold down the shift key and scroll to the bottom most track. whilst still holding shift, click the last track once. all the tracks should now be highlighted. right click one of the highlighted tracks and sellect properties and tick the `compilation album` tick box. once sonicstage has done its business (which takes a while on my 3000+ tracks) switch back to `view by album` and then `view by artist`. all the albums should then be listed as `no album artist` and in the artist initial `other`. sellect the first of a group of albums and right click and go to properties. for example, i have all the gatecrasher albums, which i all want to have the album artist of `gatecrasher`. all the tracks belonging to each album/disc have the same album title, and are now grouped together in an album with no album artist. I click the first album of the gatecrasher collection i have which is `black (disc1)` in properties type in the album artist for the album for example `Gatecrasher` and once done, highlight the name and press Ctrl+C to copy. DO NOT SET THE ARTIST INITIAL just yet. dont change any thing else and leave the cursor blinking in the `album artist` box, click next at the top of the scren to go to the next disc, in my case Black (disc2)`. If you left the cursor in the album artist box after sonicstage loaded the next album it will still be in the album artist box, just press CTRL+P to paste in the same album artist. repeat the above steps for al the albums, if your album titles are prefixed by the album artist, such as `Gatecrasher - Black (disc1)` this is even easier as all your albums will be grouped together. Finally, on the last album that uses that album artist, then sellect the album artist initial. this is as SOnicstage only seems to ``remember` the last artist initial set so it was a waste of time if you did it for each album your edited. sorry for the long reaad, but i know as a novice in other areas i hate being told to `use XX in the YY` menu which soes not really help a novice. hopefully this is of help and better than setting each individual track!

whilst i do not agree with the tone of the post, i do agree with several points. firstly, as sonicstage works with tags and not file names, it MUST be able to edit tags such as AAC/MP4 and album artist tags correctly and write those changes back to the mp3 aac/mp4 files successfully. it needs to allow group editing of tracks, im getting really fed up of having to alter the `part of compilation` tag and then doing an album artist swap everytime i re importan album. this has to be fixed, or sonic stage needs to allow the database file to be backed up WITHOUT having to duplicate the whole music directory. when it does this by the way it still messes up as it only does it in 1 folder level, ruining my arrangements of artist/album/tracks.

or could take that 50 euros and get a mp3 player & software that reads tags properly

ive looked into it futher and found out the following: easy cd extractor has the option to create 3gp containered aac files. sonicstage will AGAIN not read the tags in these files, but other programs will. its looking more and more like sonicstage uses its own private tagging system, that no other program can read nor write to. importing legal m4a files that other programs and my sony phne can read the tags from, into sonic stage, means sonic stage will not import the tags; we know this already. the problem comes in that it will not store the track art either. if you add a picture in the track properties, then click ok, sonic stage `forgets` the album art and does not display it. this makes it pretty useless! no prgram that i have found ( and ive found a lot) nows how to write sonic stage compatable tags. this again leaves me with a few choices: either i have a sonic stage compatable libary thats not compatable tag wise with any other devices and uses an unproven encoder ( we all know about the mp3 encoder/decoder disgrace when minidisc first got mp3 compatability). A universally compatable libary that i can use on my phone and any other devices EXCEPT my 706 or possible future 80x upgrade, meaning i will prob get an ipod or other media player and leave sony. Continue to use mp3s which is universally compatable but in terms of quality is reaching the end of its possibilities, plus AAC at 160/q0.5 is much better than mp3 at 160/q0.5. either way i`m dropping atrac as i now have my sony phone, which means i need to, for the first time, consider other devices for my primary mp3 player. The only solution to this is that sony open up their tagging format to alow programs to write to the file and store the album art and tags INSIDE the file, or for sony to read and (perhaps secondly but less importantly) write apple/industry compatable tags INSIDE the files WITH gapless info. i will wait for a month or two and see if theres an update to cronicstage or if sony gets its act together while i save up some money for a 80x upgrade. if the situation does not change, i`m going to move to apple or iriver in order to keep one music libary. unless some one else has a suggestion?

id go AAC, but good luck with the tagging and trying to get CronicStage to acept the tags.

i hope we see another version, but please for the love f god, FIX THE MP4 TAGS!!!! sony have to support industry standard m4a container format WITH apple tagging support that is written back to the file. since sony do not support album import via folders (files in one folder are put together in the software) and use tagging, its vitally important that they do this. the new sonic stage revision (because it is still buggy in vista) will support video for the video walkmans i think.