I've been enjoying decent battery life for about 10 months after I got the NW-A3000, where 'decent' is 8-10 hrs at best (so still a far cry from the advertised 30+hrs). That was OK, since most of my tracks were transfered as MP3s (not ATRAC) and I couldn't possibly tolerate the Brightness set to anything other than 'Maximum' (otherwise I couldn't see the screen during daytime). Screensaver off, EQ set to default, 15 sec display, new song pop-up OFF, volume 20-28. So I had accepted that the max battery life I would get from the NW-A3000 with the above settings would be around 8hrs. Which was fine.. ..UNTIL, 10 months later, I decided to play around with the ArtistLink feature. My original thought was to make 'custom' Artist Link associations so that I could get dynamic (sort of) playlists from artists that I had grouped as 'similar'. A huge mistake, as it turned out. This never really worked as intended. ArtistLink adds a ridiculous amount of time and overhead when plugging the device to the PC and while loading the device's contents (I use SonicStage CP 4.3) it is 'processing' Artist Link information for about 10 mins and doesn't allow you to skip that step if you're in a hurry. Note that this was regardless of the amount of ArtistLink data. Nevermind whether I had just one small ArtistLink 'group' or several hundreds, it would still take ages to load. Furthermore, once I did that, it seemed to irreversibly mess up the Library database. It now took ages to navigate from one track to the next and from one artist to the other (at least 5 seconds for each 'step') and the battery LITERALLY didn't last for one whole song! If I just pressed play and never touched it again, I might've been lucky if it lasted for ~20 mins. If I used any controls or browsed within the playlist, the battery would drop down dead there and then, before I even managed to finish listening to ONE track!. It could well be a coincidence, but the only thing that I could think as a culprit was my stupid idea to mess with ArtistLink. So, I exported my ArtistLink data to a txt file and removed every trace of ArtistLink information from the device & from My (PC HDD-based) Library, in the hope that things would return to normal. Things DID NOT return to normal. My NW-A3000 has been constantly plugged to the wall socket ever since. The battery just kept playing up. Tried backing up with Acronis, formatting the device, importing OMGAUDIO again. No change. Defragged the device plenty of times (it did make some diferrence in browsing time but obviously no difference whatsoever in the battery life) Firmware has been v3.0 for quite a while (before this incident). I didn't want to try downgrading to a previous version of SonicStage, having been tortured by all different incarnations of CONNECT through to SonicStage (I was one of those users who grabbed a NW-A3000 as soon as it came out in Europe). The first two versions of CONNECT were a disgrace and I never really enjoyed the NW-A3000 until SonicStage/CONNECT came along. I think SonicStage CP 4.3 is, so far, the "best" version out there. (hard to say this about such a big, cumbersome, slow, memory-hog, CPU-hungry piece of software, but IN COMPARISON and in my opinion, it is). So I didn't want to go through all the hassle of converting the library again. I accepted that it's a battery problem. Now I finally got a new battery off eBay and I'm keen to try it out. Sorry for the long post, I just thought I'd share my experience with you. Anybody else ever had trouble with ArtistLink and browsing times/battery life?
