SimonGrafftey

I thought that must be the problem. I was trying to be too clever! Unless I get an HD5H or upgrade another HD5 to a 30 gb drive, I guess I will have to wait to see if Sony bring out a 30gb version of the NW A series.

I am appproaching the capacity of my NW A3000, with 4500 mainly atrac tracks. As I had previously upgraded the drive in a HD5 from 20gb to 30gb successfully, I thought I would try with the NW A3000. Getting hold of a matching 30gb drive isn't easy - the equivalent to the Toshiba MK2008GAL drive the NW A3000 ships with is the MK3008GAL. This drive has a ZIF connector (basically a push in flexible board connector as opposed to the male-female multipin connectors in earlier models). I got one from a damaged 30gb video ipod, which had a smashed screen but the hard drive was ok. Getting at the drive in the NW A3000 is not easy and I wouldn't recommend it to any but the brave - there are 4 pins to be desoldered and resoldered to remove the motherboard and about 5 flexible connectors to disconnect and reconnect. I did however manage to put the new drive in. However, after initialising the disk and reconnecting it to my PC to my horror I found that it is still recognised as a 20gb disk! I have tried everything to try and reformat and even allocate unallocated space but nothing seems to acknowledge the extra 10gb of space. I can only deduce that the firmware in the NW A3000 is set to format a 20gb disk, irrespective of the actual disk attached, so it will always appear in Windows and SonicStage as a 20gb device. Any ideas gratefully received! I tried Partition Magic, but it doesn't recognise the device as a partitioned drive, which may be part of the problem - in properties it is listed as SONY HDD WALKMAN USB DEVICE. All other hard drives are listed by the name of the actual hard disk eg. Toshiba MK6006GAL etc.

Actually I sold the unit a few weeks ago, but the 30GB replacement disk worked fine and I never had any problems with it.

It is possible to replace the hard disk in the HD1/3/5 - I did it successfully with my HD5. The HD5 is the easiest of the three to take apart, and the hard drive is connected by a small multiconnector. The disk is automatically formatted when the machine is restarted. The drive must be the same physical size - the 20GB drives in Sony HDD walkmans are single platter and 5mm thick. Toshiba now make a single platter 40gb drive (MK4007GAL) which is 5mm thick which has the same connector. I fitted a 30GB drive (MK3006GAL) into my HD5. The NW A3000 is manufactured with two drive alternatives - they either come with an Hitachi drive or a Toshiba one. The Toshiba 20GB drive (MK2008GAL) has a new type of connector, ZIF (zero insertion force). There is a compatible 30GB drive (MK3008GAL) which is 5mm thick and could be used in the NW A3000. The process is more tricky than for the HD1/3/5 models because 4 pins have to be desoldered to get access to the drive which is a bit fiddly. The other practical issue is getting hold of replacement drives. The demand from DAP player manufacturers is so high that not much stock reaches the retail market.

Sony UK have today released an update which hopefully will address some of the problems identified with Connect Player. Please look at the following for info: http://www.sonydigital-link.com/DNA/Connec....asp?l=en&ul=en

In answer to the questions raised: I have a mixture of ATRAC and MP3 tracks and there is no difficulty in transferring either type to the NW A3000 and I haven't noticed any transfer speed difference. The track title does scroll if it is too long for the screen The playback screen shows track title, artist, album, genre as well as the usual play/pause indicator, battery strength, play mode indicator and track number. A good feature is that the name of the track playing is displayed at the bottom of the screen when you go to a menu to chose another track. There is a same time lag when starting up the device, when a splash screen is displayed, but it is no more than 3 seconds before the current track starts playing.

Although I have been a regular user of this excellent forum, this is my first contribution. I purchased an NW A3000 on Friday, from a UK Sony Centre, who are the first to have the units available in the UK. The unit came with Connect Player 1.0, which I regret to say after a weekend of perseverance is extremely disappointing. Put simply, I can’t get it to work. I have 4200 Atrac files in my SonicStage database, which Connect Player offers no easier means to import other than File/Directory import. There does not seem to be any way to import playlists from SonicStage. I made several attempts to import the files all of which were ultimately unsuccessful. The software offers the iTunes style option of manual or sync connection to your device (i.e. the NW A3000) but I found that after transferring 200 or so tracks the process would hang indefinitely. The only way to stop it was to detach the NW A3000, which resulted both in the database on the NW A3000 being corrupted and Connect Player not opening when I tried to reuse the software. The only way to get the program open again was to delete the library folder in the All Users\Application Data\Sony Corporation\Connect Player path, which meant that there were now no tracks imported. Lastly I tried to import the tracks and manually transfer them to the NW A3000, but although Connect Player seemed to import the tracks ok (it takes about 4 hours to do 4200 tracks, far longer than in SonicStage) after closing Connect Player, it took 5 minutes to open again and then froze completely. I simply could’t open it without scrubbing the library again. It seems to me that Sony have rushed this software out – I can’t believe my problems are due computer compatibility as I am using a month old Vaio. There are some potentially good features in Connect Player – drag and drop, the sync function and a folder watch function, which I presume allows automatic updates of any new tracks added by another program such as SonicStage. But there are major drawbacks, not least that it doesn’t work, but also there is no back up tool, so if your database was damaged or your computer blew up, you would be stuck – I don’t think simply backing up and restoring the oma file folders would work with a new install on another machine. The only way to back up would be to use SonicStage back up tool, but then all tracks would have to be imported/ripped with SonicStage and then either the folder watch function used or the files be imported into Connect Player, which seems crazy. Luckily the NW A3000 does connect to SonicStage, so I can at least use the machine. (It is important to initialise the NW A3000 before using SonicStage to transfer files, otherwise the folder structure created by Connect Player stays on the hard disk which seems to confuse the NW A3000 and slow down the menus). The intelligent playlists and Artist link won’t work, but for me personally these seem like over-engineering anyway. I cannot understand why Sony has tried to re-invent the wheel with Connect Player. I know there are valid criticisms of SonicStage, but it has been developed over 5 years and SonicStage 3.3 seems pretty good to me – it’s fast and reasonably easy to use and is backwardly compatible with all NW devices. Surely it would have been easier to redevelop SonicStage for the NW A series, rather than starting all over again. It feels like Sony have gone backwards, to the early days of OpenMG, which used to crash and freeze all the time. I have tried Connect Player with my HD5, but it does not recognise it. I haven't tried an earlier device, but I assume the result would be the same. Here are some thoughts on the NW A3000: The OLED screen is bright and clear, although because the front "glass" is so shiny (I have the silver version), it seems less so in strong daylight or bright indoor lighting. It seems that it is readable in most conditions though. There is one big drawback - you cannot switch the display to permanently on (which I think you can with Sony's earlier OLED devices). There are three display options, 30 sec on (each time a button is pushed), 30 sec on and switch for 30 sec at each change of track and 15 sec on. So unless you look at the device when a track changes (using the second setting) you have to push a button each time to see the display. One feature I like that applies to all menus and track lists is that they are both in scroll and page format, so if you chose for example an artist and all their tracks, you can either scroll down the list with up/down or page across (each page being the number of tracks the screen can display (5 tracks). This also works in initial search - when you page across you get a different letter at the top. This makes finding a track easier and faster than on the HD5. There are several search methods: Initial search, for which you can chose artist, album or song; Library search, where you chose playlist, all songs, album, artist ,genre, rating, release date and recent transfers. The last three don't work with SonicStage transferred tracks though. The Headphone volume seems pretty loud, I don't know if there is an EU limiter applied. You can switch between line out and headphone as on previous devices. The equaliser presets are pretty much the same as those on the HD5, there are two custom settings with a seven segment equaliser to adjust. I have noticed that whilst playlists are transferred ok with SonicStage, the names get swapped - for example, if you had two playlists in SonicStage of Favourites and Party, the tracks for Favourites might appear under the Party heading on the device, and vice versa. The only intelligent shuffle function available with SonicStage transfers is All shuffle (the others are my favourite and time machine, which require Connect Player), which immediately starts playing a shuffle of all your tracks. This mode will stop if you go back to a menu and chose a specific track, album or artist. The usual normal, repeat shuffle, shuffle & repeat and repeat 1 song can be set and will apply to what you chose - all songs, artist, album, genre etc. One good feature on both normal shuffle and All shuffle is that you can go backwards up to 20 songs that have been in the shuffle previously, by double clicking left arrow for each track you want to go back. Other features I haven't seen before are trash can - you can mark a track to be deleted from the unit next time you sync (doesn't work with SonicStage) you can also undo a trashed track if you put it in by mistake. There is a unit info screen in settings which shows software version and the number of tracks on the unit, which is quite useful. You can also select the option of detailed info whilst a track is playing which shows codec, track length and other info such as year if the data is available. Finally, it is heavier than the HD5, but not unpleasantly so. You do notice it a bit in a shirt pocket however. I have the pdf of the user manual and will try to get it uploaded to the download site by sending it to Kurisu.