NW-A3000/1000 - Basic Features Request

[NoOneHome]

I've been using my NW-A3000 for several months now, and there are several basic features that are missing from the NW-A Series that are essential (IHMO) for easy, frustration-free use. These features are not so much a wish-list, but more of a "why didn't they include these" list.

What's more frustrating is that these should be considered basic music player features, and are found on the mayority of other non-Sony players. Please Sony, these should be easy to implement in a firmware upgrade:

• Seach for Album by Genre:

  This is one of the most annoying ommissions. eg. If I want to listen to a Chillout/Ambient album, which I'll often do later at night, or a Dance album, I have to scroll through several hundred albums and try to remember which albums are in one of these genres! Often I find myself drilling down and playing an album just to remind myself if it's in one of these genres. The Genre search by song feature is of no use, as selecting a song by genre plays that artist's songs only, which is nearly always only a song or 2 because Chillout, Ambient, Dance etc albums are usually Various Artist compilation albums.

  .

• Shuffle play Albums:

  Most of us usually want to listen to more than one album at a time, and usually in the same genre, but without having to pick another album each time the current one ends. Currently the only option is to listen a mish-mash of songs, eg. a indie song followed by a classical song followed by a gapless trance song from the middle of an album, etc. I'd like to say "shuffle my Indie albums" - I get to listen to the style of music I'm in the mood for and I don't end up with mixed tracks all over the place.

  .

• Album Artist displayed when using Search by Album:

  Finding albums alphabetically is fine, but when you have hundreds and can't see the album artist it makes it really tedious choosing an album to play. I'd like to see an option to enable/disable displaying the album artist name underneath each album name in the album list (maybe using a smaller font for the list when enabled). Alternatively even just being able to press the "Option" button in album list mode and having the album artist & genre details also appear on the options menu would be a huge leap forward.

PS. If anyone knows of a way of doing any of these that I've missed, please let me know. Edited February 26, 2006 by NoOneHome

[mgillespie]

Play Next

Plays whatever is selected (Album, Track, Artist, Playlist), after the current list of tracks have played.

My 4 year old Creative Jukebox had no ploblem doing this, why is it so diffucult for Sony to do this on their current products?? (Poor Design??)

[hp1975]

NoOneHOme:

I think you're list is spot on, particulalry the shuffle album, I rarely listen to just the odd song here and there, I like to listen to an album in its entirety.

Surely some of these options must be possible with another firmware upgrade?

[Richard_p]

alot of the elctronic music which i listen to has a tendancy to be rather obscure in the Genre department, so i do not particularly bother using the search by genre feature on my HD5.

I also find it annoying however that 'Artist' is given priority whilst searching and even when viewing in SS. i have so many different ones on there, the majority of which with between 1-3 songs. End result also never use the artist search function.

Albums on the other hand i have came up with a reasonable method of doing so. It's pretty Simple:

I have Way Out West's three albums on there, (abrreviated to W.O.W) so i name them the following.

W.O.W - Way Out West

W.O.W - Intensify

W.O.W - Don't Look Now

Basically just put the artists name before the actual title when titlting the album in Sonic Stage/Connect. then you can go through albums normally and can see the artist name, in alphabetical order, with all of one groups albums together.

When titling VA compilations i always put the series name infront:

Euphoria - Deeper (CD1)

Euphoria - Deeper (CD2)

Euphoria - For the Mind Body And Soul (CD1)

Euphoria - For the Mind Body And Soul (CD2)

Euphoria - Hard House (CD1)

Euphoria - Hard House (CD2)

This way all compilations from the same series are together in the albums view, in alphabeticl order by name of series.

I cannot speak for the A-Series walkman but my HD5 has a pretty neat album shufle feature on it. This is accesed by going Options > Play mode > Shuffle Items, after selecting this option choose to play something from the albums search and once it is played through fully it will selct another album at random. Although once again this is no respecter of genre, it has been known to play Hard House after Ambient/ Chilled music Here you have two choices put up with it or manually select something.

As for shuffling single tracks i have done it once and it was certainly 'interesting' with the majority of my tracks being mixed it would begin mixing into one track and then randomly go into something totally different, although usually perfectly trimed depending on the two tracks. Very strange ecperience.

Hope i have helped in some way.

[eggtimer]

A workaround (sort of) to search for Album by Genre:

1) Through Genre, choose one song which you know is from the album you want

2) Once that song is playing, hit Option and choose 'Go to Album'

3) Wait a little (...Accessing...) then hit play to play that whole album from the beginning

Not very good I know - but I think the 'Go to Artist' and 'Go to Album' features on the NW-A3000/1000 are nice, this is not something found on my wife's 30GB iPod.

-

A workaround to Shuffle Play Albums

1) Make genre playlists of your albums.

2) Use shuffle play within the playlist you want - unfortunately of course it will start playing any random track, not the first track of the album, although you can fix that if you want using steps (2) and (3) above

3) Once the playlist is playing, use the Option key, scroll down to play mode, and change to 'normal'.

Again quite a lot of button pressing, but it does work quite well. (It is not ideal because once the playlist is playing then it plays in a fixed order, to make it shuffle again after the first album is finished you would need to go back to the play mode options and switch on shuffle mode again). Even so, I do think the ability to change play mode while a song continues playing is a nice feature.

Edited April 3, 2006 by eggtimer

[eggtimer]

Here is another problem, which can also be a potentially neat trick:

I've discovered that the player limits the album length to 60 characters. So if you have two albums with the same first 60 characters, e.g.

Very-Long-album-name-mentioning-soloists-and-remastering (Disc 1)

Very-Long-album-name-mentioning-soloists-and-remastering (Disc 2)

then the player thinks those are the same album, and all the songs on those two albums (treated as a single album by the player) will be played in alphabetical order.

For example if the tracks are named

Disc 1

01-A song on disc 1

02-Another cool song on disc 1

....

Disc 2

01-Great tune on disc 2

02-More good music on disc 2

....

then the player will play the tracks in this order:

01-A song on disc 1

01-Great tune on disc 2

02-Another cool song on disc 1

02-More good music on disc 2

To avoid this problem you need to keep album names to less than 60 characters.

Alternatively you can exploit it so that the player will play through the whole of Disc 1 and Disc 2 as a single album. Keep the album names over 60 characters with the first 60 characters the same (adding spaces or details before "Disc 1/2" if you need to). Name the tracks so that they will always be in the right order even when the albums are 'merged' by the player. For example you could use track numbering 101, 102 ... on Disc 1 and 201, 202 ... on Disc 2.

This can be especially nice for audiobooks etc which span several discs.

It does not have to be used for multi-disk albums, it could also be used for other albums which you would always want to play in a fixed order.