love the vaio pocket, but issues kill...

[sane1]

i've had my vaio pocket for a while now and i am absolutely in love with it, especially the superb sound quality (very tight low freq response), startup time, album covers, 40gb for $230 is a steal (even cheaper now), gorgeous display, and battery life... but there are some issues that really bother me:

-laggy perforamance (2-3 seconds going from now playing to list of songs (ex. playlist, album) and then another 2-3 seconds to switch to another song once clicked)

-crashed a few times already

-not as pocket friendly as i first assumed, but i make it so the screen is in my pocket while the g-sense buttons are all out.. allowing me to use the ff,rw,play/stop,vol+,vol- buttons with my eyes closed.

-can't use amp + line-out for portable use (requires dock)

-sonicstage is horrendous

..those bug me, but my main issue is this, and i'm hoping it's a solvable issue since it deals with sonicstage 3.2:

-Artist groupings don't work for me (i click on that artist and, besides their album, it lists a huge number of songs that seems to be a group of a bunch of random songs... idk why this is?!)... so basically all the random/non-album songs of all artists seem to be grouped together as "untitled" or something even though i left it blank for group/album. anybody else have this problem and/or know what should be done?

[Dimitri]

Yes, this player is laggy for navigation. Believe it or not, it was actually worse before the firmware update in December2003. I just crank the vol full and set to no EQ and use the headphone jack for line-out without the dock. Works great in the car but unsure if that's acceptable for an amp.

As for your main issue:

I always have albums assigned but I have a number of albums titled 'Greatest Hits'. If I go into an Artist who has a greatest hits album, all other artists' greatest hits albums' songs are thrown in the mix. So my issue was much like yours except instead of having the common group name being blank, they were titled the same.

Every conceptual group that doesn't have a unique name assigned to album/group will be jumbled together even if they are different artists, when trying to browse by artist.

It's a bug with the player itself, not SonicStage, and don't hold your breath for Sony to fix it either.

EDIT: Forgot to add, my way around it was to title each greatest hits name with the artists' name in front of it to be unique. Yours may be to slap the artists' names on the album field to ensure they are unique.

Edited September 30, 2005 by Dimitri

[sane1]

dimitri, thank you. and if you're russian, spasibo. you've answered a simple question that neither sony customer service nor ss customer service could answer. i gave up on them. a bug huh... so i guess i'm just not going to use the Artist option at all. the Group section does it fine, although i'll have to manually organize by alphabetical order. oh well, i'll get over it.

the lag does suck, and yeah i did try it out before the firmware update and it was def much more laggier before. i'm really surprised with sony for this. and yeah headphone jack works great in my car with eq off since the sq is so clean, but as for amp use it's no good.

[Dimitri]

Yeah, my main gripe with the player is the laggy navigation, at least when compared to other hard drive players. Oops, that should've read December2004 for the firmware upgrade. The other gripe is the headphone amp seems slightly weaker than even Sony's MD units. Not enough to cause any problems since I generally only use it in the car and at work. The great screen and gapless playback really sold it for me, though.

[Stefan1]

You might encounter less lag if you use the default skin, and don't use any album art.

[sane1]

yeah that's what i'm doing at the moment and i've always prefered the default skin... still no difference. it's quite sad. i used my friend's 20GB iPod Photo and it was a breeze to find songs.. no lag whatsoever..