CONNECT Player - bugs and limitations

[NoOneHome]

I disabled my floppy drive in XP Device Manager. It was even accessing the floppy randomly while importing an album . Not sure what the "Enable network features" does, but the manual helpfully says:

With it checked, a variety of functions associated with service via the Internet become effective.

Note: The functions associated with service via the Internet differ depending on the country or region of your residency. 

[C_player]

Some things to do that might help out your Connect player experience are...

1. Disable the ArtistLink feature in Preferences. This will give back a lot of CPU time (and memory) to the software

2. Do not enable full sync mode to the Walkman. Using manual mode will have you waiting far less often to transfer files

3. Leave the Walkman disconnected when the player starts up each time. Having it plugged in puts the player into a busy state where it spends a lot of time talking to both the device and the library

4. Don't fret over the purported lack of communications on fixes and new features. I have it on good authority that many things are getting worked on and those things will become known soon enough. Really!

Hang in there, its getting better little by little.

[NoOneHome]

Let's hope that they release these fixes soon.

Personally I think Sony would do well to announce to both registered users and on the sonydigital-link.com CP support site that an improved version is in the pipeline. It might encourage many users to hold on, who have now instead given up and returned their units or are thinking of doing so.

It makes good business sense to re-assure your customers that you take the situation seriously and are working hard to address it. We have 4 x A-series players amongst friends and family, and 2 are now actively considering returning their units whilst the rest of us are battling with the frustration and time-wasting using CP (in between the odd re-install). Some acknowledgement from Sony could help them hang on to customers that may otherwise permanently lose faith in the Sony brand.

[Bad_Guy]

Hello,

Is it normal that each time I convert my audio CD to atrac files, I retrieved all informations from database Gracenote (Track Name, Album Name,...). But it's impossible to get the cover of my CD !

[C_player]

Hello,

Is it normal that each time I convert my audio CD to atrac files, I retrieved all informations from database Gracenote (Track Name, Album Name,...). But it's impossible to get the cover of my CD !

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Yes, the Connect player does not get the cover art for your CDs. This isn't a common feature among the "larger players" right now.

[sh33p]

Bug: The Import Directory function doesn't work for me... I tried to import a folder where I have several albums and they just don't go in, I have to Import File and do each album folder individually.

Bug: CONNECT occasionally ignores a track when Importing File because (I think) the file is not tagged. This has only happened twice though, so it's not a major issue. Concentrate on the first one

[sh33p]

Limitation: CONNECT player organises itslef the folders from a ropped cd. We could have a choice not to let it do this! (like Itune option).

More to come!

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in the options menu you can select the folder format you want your files to be saved and the way the songs are titled....

if it didn't organise the files what would you want done with them after ripping?

[NoOneHome]

Some helpful hints (especially if doing compilation CDs):

Remove Genre from CD Ripping format:

I've found that the best file naming option when ripping CDs is "%R\%A\%T - %N - %S". By removing the Genre (%G\) you don't have the problem of a complilation CD (eg. Now album) containing many songs with different genres ending up in a dozen or so separate folders! (and your OMA files aren't in the wrong folders if you decide to change the genre of any songs). Also when playing OMA files in Windows Media Player it makes more sense, as they play in the right order due to the track number and show the artist and song name.

Importing compilation CDs:

When importing compilation CDs, specifying the Album Artist name as "Various Artists" will place all the compilation CDs in subfolders within a "Various Artists" folder, making them easier to find/manage.

Fixing imported albums that end up in multiple same-named library albums:

One of the biggest pains is when an imported album ends up as many single track albums. This happens when some/all tracks have a different Album Artist. If you change the Album Artist (no need to change Song Artist) these tracks will then merge back into a single album.

Unfortunately, unlike SS3.3, you can't just select all the tracks and change the Album Artist for all tracks. The quickest way I've found to change these so far (due to CP not allowing multi-track property changes) is as follows:

Make sure you've got the Album Artist name in the clipboard (eg. copy the text using Ctrl+c). I use 'Various Artists' for compilation CDs.

Choose "All Tracks" view in CP, sorted by Album, and select the 1st song in the album that has the problem. Then repeat the following steps for each album.

- Press Alt+e, Alt+e, Tab, Tab, Tab, Ctrl+v

(this should open the current track properties & paste in the required 'Album Artist')

- Press Enter, Enter, cursor down.

Importing Singles:

If you have a lot of CD/mp3 singles to import (I've got about 200 Dance CD singles), change the Album to 'Singles (genre)' and the Album Artist to 'Various Artists'. This will stop you from having hundreds of 1 track albums to search through on the player (eg. my 200 singles were in 200 albums named after the single and are now in 1 album called 'Singles (Dance)'. I can now shuffle within my one album and don't 200 pointless albums to scroll through.

Lets hope they fix the 'change properties of multiple tracks' limitation/bug soon .

[Ishiyoshi]

Some helpful hints (especially if doing compilation CDs):

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Thanks for posting your observation. I will implement part of it into our CONNECT Player FAQ.

[PowerShot]

I have a double cd. Cd 1 is a data and music cd, ordernery music files. Cd 2 is a clean music cd without any text files on it. My problem is how do you get Connect Player to recognaise the music files on that first cd. The man that made the cd have inplanted a book inside the first cd, and music. Problem is that no file program, or Connect player see the music files so that I can convert them to atrac. But cd player, Windows media Player and Real Player recognaise the music files and offer to rip them to mp3 files. I searched Media player in property and find that they use some thing like protocols and files type; to recognaise wmpcd://0/1. Where 0 is the drive number, and 1 is the song number. It was all that I could find out about it, I'm no expert in this. So how do I get Connect Player to recognais this ordenary music files that is invisible in ech windows explorer, ech. Or is this just a miss from they who made Connect Player. Some one know how I can get this ordenary .cda files out of the cd or somthing. So that I can get it to my nw-a3000 player. When I click start>my computer I see the icon and a name. It read NOCOMP (F:). The icon have + and a note in front of an cd icon.

Edited December 28, 2005 by PowerShot

[Marquis79]

Let's hope that they release these fixes soon.

Personally I think Sony would do well to announce to both registered users and on the sonydigital-link.com CP support site that an improved version is in the pipeline.  It might encourage many users to hold on, who have now instead given up and returned their units or are thinking of doing so.

It makes good business sense to re-assure your customers that you take the situation seriously and are working hard to address it.  Some acknowledgement from Sony could help them hang on to customers that may otherwise permanently lose faith in the Sony brand.

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Oh Boy, you articulate what I´m thinking!! I consider seriously too, to give my gadget back (but it´s so fancy ) . It´s cheeky to release such a piece of software. Sony are japanese, the developers must do hara-kiri

I´d like to know how many people are working on CP at the moment and when they planning to release a new update...

[JKRashid]

Can anyone get album artwork onto thier albums? Sometimes it looks as if its working , then when i restart the app its gone!! Most of the time i try to drag and drop a album artwork picture and nothinghappens or the app freezes. I finally got all 130 albums on the library and on my a3000! Its just the artwork! :-(

[C_player]

Can anyone get album artwork onto thier albums? Sometimes it looks as if its working , then when i restart the app its gone!! Most of the time i try to drag and drop a album artwork picture and nothinghappens or the app freezes.

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I've have seen this happen sometimes too. The best I can say is to use smaller album artwork (300x300 seems to work well) and GIF or JPG files. Also, don't plan on doing a lot of them at a time, keep your album artwork sessions to 10 or less in a shot.

Finally, make sure the "write to file" option is checked in the song properties. If it isn't you aren't really saving the changes you make to anything other than the library.

[JKRashid]

I've have seen this happen sometimes too.  The best I can say is to use smaller album artwork (300x300 seems to work well) and GIF or JPG files.  Also, don't plan on doing a lot of them at a time, keep your album artwork sessions to 10 or less in a shot.

Finally, make sure the "write to file" option is checked in the song properties.  If it isn't you aren't really saving the changes you make to anything other than the library.

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I tried it, resized the pics to 300x300, the picture on the top large screen appeared but not on the library list, then when i restarted it was gone again, ill try using even smaller jpgs!

Edited December 29, 2005 by JKRashid

[NoOneHome]

I've tried dragging or browsing to artwork but it disappears as soon as I move off and back on to the album. I've tried gragging it to the individual tracks in the album as well. Basically it doesn't work.

However, I have a couple of albums that do have artwork that show up in CP, but these were imported from SonicStage. SonicStage did pick up a couple of album covers along with the CD details from Gracenote, but these were French CDs

For info, the artwork I have is called jacket01.jpg, lives in the album folder and is 400x400 pixels (approx 30k).

[C_player]

I've tried dragging or browsing to artwork but it disappears as soon as I move off and back on to the album.  I've tried gragging it to the individual tracks in the album as well.  Basically it doesn't work.

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Another couple of things to check, because I've seen this happen too: is the song in question write protected by Windows? Is the ID3 tag data corrupt? If it is the player won't attempt to write the artwork to the file. At least it doesn't on my PC.

A troubleshooting proceedure I've come up with goes something like this:

1. Try to add artwork to a song. Click another song, then come back to the one you just added artwork to. Does it still have the artwork?

2. If you're sure the song file can be written to, after adding the artwork, remove the song from the player's library. Then import it back in. Does it have the artwork now?

3. Open the same song in another player/editor, like SonicStage or MediaMonkey (great for MP3 tag cleaning). Can you see the artwork there?

4. In another editor, add the artwork. If the song already exists in Connect player, remove it from the library, then add it back in. Does it have the artwork now?

I usually get it to work in steps 1 and 2, but I've had really messed up ID3 tags that made me go all the way to step 4. After all of these steps I've never had a single song that "refused" to take artwork.

[stephroberts11]

Can someone PLEASE HELP ME!!! I'm not really having any problems with getting CDs onto the device but I'm NEVER able to get any CD information at all (from Gracenote) and have been having to type it in manually, which is really pissing me off. It's probably really simple but I'm tired and my brain hurts. Can someone tell me how to fix it?

[C_player]

Can someone PLEASE HELP ME!!! I'm not really having any problems with getting CDs onto the device but I'm NEVER able to get any CD information at all (from Gracenote) and have been having to type it in manually, which is really pissing me off.  It's probably really simple but I'm tired and my brain hurts. Can someone tell me how to fix it?

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You have probably run into one of the following things:

1. Did you register with Gracenote? The dialog pops up underneath the player so sometimes you don't see it. If you don't register it won't ever work.

2. Do other applications take over the CD drive? If so, you'll have to disable them prior to inserting your CDs. Telling Windows to "Take no Action" when it prompts you to do something will fix that.

3. Do you use proxies or firewalls? Gracenote doesn't work well with either one, and generally it needs to have exactly the same web settings as IE does to work.

4. Does the "Detailed Info" option work with Gracenote? Try enabling it in the Preferences, CD Ripping page, Display detailed track info check box

That's what I can think of to help solve this issue.

[sh33p]

Try WMP and see if that album info works. if it does you might as well use WMP to rip to mp3 and then just import to CONNECT probably easier than typing everything in.

[C_player]

Try WMP and see if that album info works. if it does you might as well use WMP to rip to mp3 and then just import to CONNECT probably easier than typing everything in.

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It's worth noting that WMP does not put album artwork into the song files, but puts it into the same directory as the songs that are ripped. So it will still be some work to fix the artwork after importing a CD.

[Rumz]

Question: why does CP look for a floppy drive? I don't have a floppy drive in my machine (no a: drive) yet every time I start CP I get an error saying the A:\ drive is not ready.

One other comment: Adding tracks to my player seems to take an unnecessarily long time. First, when I plug in the player while Connect is running, it checks all the tracks on the player-- or at least it says it's doing something like that. Then what I did next was take a new playlist with new files that I had just ripped and dragged the playlist icon over to the A608 icon. I thought it would just transfer the files over and I'd be fine, should be a breeze... nope. I click on the A608 icon to see what it's doing and it's checking each file on my A608 (like it's syncing or something, even though I have it set to manual sync) one by one before getting to the files that needed transferring. As a result it took several minutes to add those new files to the player instead of a few seconds.

Is this due to the fact that I sent them over via playlist? If I had transferred them over without a playlist and sent a playlist over later would it have been a lot faster? Sorry I didn't have time to do any more experimenting this morning. In any case, it seems like there's got to be a more efficient way to update the player without acting like it's re-exporting every file that's already on the player.

[Guest Stuge]

Question:  why does CP look for a floppy drive?  I don't have a floppy drive in my machine (no a: drive) yet every time I start CP I get an error saying the A:\ drive is not ready.

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Connect was also accessing Floppy Drive at start on my PC as well but SSver3.3 doesn`t do that .Amazing Another bug found .

Why Does CP wants a floppy drive on a computer ? This is another reason for its slow startup .

[Spacecase]

I disconnected my floppy drive (don't use it anyway) it still doesn't boot up any quicker without it tho', just doesn't make an irritating noise as it tries to scan the drive.

[sh33p]

CONNECT Limitation: Album art cannot be applied to albums and consequently automatically to all the tracks within that album. Almost defeats the purpose of ALBUM art to apply it to individual tracks.... you know?

CONNECT Limitation: Gracenote CDDB is unable to identify and tag tracks already imported in library. Furthermore, track tag changes made with another program (ie WMP) are not updated in CONNECT (Someone might have mentioned this already, I'm sorry)

[Waqas_]

Connect was also accessing Floppy Drive at start on my PC as well  but SSver3.3 doesn`t do that  .Amazing Another  bug found .

Why Does CP wants a floppy drive on a computer ? This is another reason for its slow startup .

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Did you disable the floppy in your pc's bios?

I don't have a floppy drive in my system and connect has never given any errors regarding floppy access

Edited January 1, 2006 by Waqas

[Zizone_]

I confirm a bug: it's not only jap, but any small tiny little "foreign" caracter in a track info within a whole album, and you can be SURE the track goes to "Unknown" genre, with no album title, no artist, and sees its name transform to xx(number of track)-title, and of course no more cd cover!!!!! then it's a real "PLEASURE" to re enter the whole list of info in the track properties, with copy-paste, or you own good memory... be careful to be really PRECISE entering the infos.... siiiigh....

Hey SONY, don't forget to give us tag options a la Itunes/sonicstage, with scrolling menus of previousl entered infooooos and full UNICODE suppoooooort! are you listeniiiiiing? (echoe echoe...)

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My NW-A1000 (JP version) picks up Japanese and Korean without any problem. They do not go into "unknown," even if they contain both languages in track info.

It works as if it were unicode in my computer and NW-A1000. So far I tried Japanese, Korean, and English without encountering any problems.

Only problem is when I switch languages by using IME to search, CP freezes.

Edited January 1, 2006 by Zizone

[willykyu]

My A-3000 handles perfectly Japanese caracters, that's ok, BUT I'm talking about Connect player. I have to encode through Sonicstage, and then import my atrac files. I have a French Windows XP service pack 2 installed, Connect Player last version, and I can tell that it's absolutely impossible to import correctly Japanese CD. It's a big mess. Reading you, I think it maybe a problem with French language, and it doesn't occur with an English OS.

[sh33p]

CONNECT Limitation: Gracenote CDDB is unable to identify and tag tracks already imported in library.

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wait ok... CONNECT apparently updates track tags automatically if you enable ArtistLink background service and network features, leave CONNECT open with an active internet connection, but I'm talking about on-demand tag updating. if tag updating was only performed on a by-demand basis that would probably also free a lot of the system resources that connect currently hogs

Edited January 1, 2006 by sh33p