What on earth are Sony up to?

[mgillespie]

After owning my NW-A3000 for 3 months 1/4 of a year, the state of the Connect software is as bad as it's ever been. I have owned this pretty brick for 3 damn months, with constant promises of improvements, yet all we get fed is small updates that don't fix the fundimental issues.

Last night I spend 4 hours trying to put 1 damn album on my NW-A3000. I gave up at 2AM, and went to bed.

SonicStage 3.4 would not load it, neither did Connect 1.03, constant messages "Error" and "Transcode Error". Tried MP3, WMA importing, and also tried ripping from within SonicStage and Connect, non of it worked. The CD has NO copy protection (it's from 1984). Tried 2 different PC's (1 of which is a new Vaio laptop), neither wanted to copy the files. I reset the NW-A3000, uninstalled SonicStage, uninstalled Connect, re-installed Conect

Surely this is basic functionality that is broken here. I feel the product really is not fit for purpose....

[bangraman]

Tried ripping the CD in something else to MP3? iTunes?

However I don't see what you're so surprised about. The Walkman division has been doing the same thing for the last 5 years... releasing beautiful looking gear that doesn't work very well.

[Richard_p]

Sounds pretty dire!

It's appaling really, CD ripping does eem pretty basic, neccessary funtionality. Can it manage to copy other CD's? perhaps the disc is damged (being from 1984).

I have actually to almost like Sonic Stage, in my years of using it. CD ripping is usually pretty straight forward as is transferring. (although there are some issues which i'd like to see addressed) I'd never dream of using it as my primary PC music player though.

[bogon07]

As bangraman says try ripping the CD in something such as iTunes, WMP10 or CDex. Suggest use CDex to rip as .wav files then import the files into SonicStage.

Also try a lens cleaner on your disc drive.

[Guest Stuge]

Also try a lens cleaner on your disc drive.

If you ask Sony Engineers they will say no to Len cleaning cd`s .According to them they scatches your lens

My Experiance tell that they don`t work at all .

[bogon07]

The same Sony "engineers" that gave us ConnectPlayer and the now discontinued Bean walkman perhaps.

Hard to imagine the soft hairs on a lens cleaner CD could scratch anything.

I've found a lens cleaner CD helpful to remove dust and fluff on the PC and CD players.

[mgillespie]

Yes, I used CDEX, it created files with no problems, these would also not copy.

The problem was not ripping, it was a transferring issue.

I KNOW the problem is with Connect, or OpenMG, as I fired up a clean XP, with VMWare, connected my Walkman via USB to the VM, installed Connect and the 1.03 update, and it appears to be working again.

My 2 primary PC's are totally screwed as far as Connect and SonicStage go, uninstalling and re-installing does not fix this.

I assume it's the databases that are screwed, but have no info on how to remove them

Does anyone have a method for TOTALLY cleaning a system of Connect/ConnectDB/SonicStage/OpenMG and the like, so people can start again?

I am a bit of a whiz writing software, I can knock up a C++ cleaning application, if someone could work out the steps required to clean a system off...

[alfablue]

The database is probably corrupted, and even a uninstall / reinstall won't help probably because original folders remain. I had this and I unistalled everything and made sure I removed all folders manually after this. Connect works ok now, just slow (eg 5 minutes to load, 5 minutes to sync), but at least all functions do seem to work.

[mgillespie]

How do I delete the database? Is the database part of play history? As part of my fixing, I also lost all my Top100, and Play History data, I would REALLY like to get them back, before I start deleting files from my PC>,..