Should I get an A-3000?

[jonny mac]

I have recently found a UK e-tailer now selling the violet A3000 for only £115! This might be linked to Sony's recent price drop and a replacement model is expected soon. I currently use HiMD for the vast bulk of my music listening but a HDD player would be handy for some occasions. Should I get one at this price or wait to see what Sony bring out to replace it?

[markey]

a new 20 gig sony at that price? you can't go wrong. i payed £120 for an a1000 last week and i thought that was a good deal. go for it!

[Borat]

Indeed, it's a great price and a proven machine. I paid full price (£200) for mine last year and still think it was worth it (just about).

If you do you'll probably want to upgrade to firmware version 3.0 that adds AAC support and a clock and calendar.

[Guest Stuge]

Jonny,Go & Catch it ..A3000

[bobspud]

Unless you have kept your ID tags in order on all your mp3s I would not touch _ANY_ sony product. The software just sucks. I had an Ipod mini and used to use a product called ephpod to transfere my music to it. it gave me a file system view and I just picked the songs I wanted and it transered them using the file_name...

Simple and effective.

Don't get me wrong The sony is far better for sound quality

but you can't read the display in sun light and Sonicstage is a mess.

Save your cash and go for something else

[MiG]

Unless you have kept your ID tags in order on all your mp3s I would not touch _ANY_ sony product. The software just sucks. I had an Ipod mini and used to use a product called ephpod to transfere my music to it. it gave me a file system view and I just picked the songs I wanted and it transered them using the file_name...

Simple and effective.

Don't get me wrong The sony is far better for sound quality

but you can't read the display in sun light and Sonicstage is a mess.

Save your cash and go for something else

Really you must be using a Pentium II 400mhz and Windows 98 or something because the new connect player is one of the fastest players i have ever come across.

The UI isnt the best in the world, but all u need to do is go to File --> Import Files, and then watch it transfer all of your files seemlessly.

IF you want to transfer files to your device via windows explorer, buy a cheap ass £30 Flash MP3 Player, i on the other hand like the new version of connect player, and it is extremely fast.

Computer Specs:

AMD X2 3800+ @ 2.7ghz

1gb OCZ Platinum

Nvidia 7800GT.

DFI NF4 SLI-DR mobo.

[dgsquier]

Really you must be using a Pentium II 400mhz and Windows 98 or something because the new connect player is one of the fastest players i have ever come across.

The UI isnt the best in the world, but all u need to do is go to File --> Import Files, and then watch it transfer all of your files seemlessly.

IF you want to transfer files to your device via windows explorer, buy a cheap ass £30 Flash MP3 Player, i on the other hand like the new version of connect player, and it is extremely fast.

Computer Specs:

AMD X2 3800+ @ 2.7ghz

1gb OCZ Platinum

Nvidia 7800GT.

DFI NF4 SLI-DR mobo.

I'm using an nForce 2 Mainboard, AMD 3700 with 2GB Ram, a system that routinely manages video editing, Word and the BBC's BIONIC climate experiment at the same time. However, it cannot run any other program with connect player because of the resources taken by tinyhttp.exe. Even so the latest version hangs for hours, loses connection with my NW A3000, and always starts with several cherry "Drive not Ready" messages.

All of which is a big improvement on the last version of the software. I used to rely on SonicStage 3.4, but v.4 corrupts the device's database everytime I connect it.

Would I have one again, not if Sony paid me £115.

[bobspud]

Really you must be using a Pentium II 400mhz and Windows 98 or something because the new connect player is one of the fastest players i have ever come across.

The UI isnt the best in the world, but all u need to do is go to File --> Import Files, and then watch it transfer all of your files seemlessly.

IF you want to transfer files to your device via windows explorer, buy a cheap ass £30 Flash MP3 Player, i on the other hand like the new version of connect player, and it is extremely fast.

Computer Specs:

AMD X2 3800+ @ 2.7ghz

1gb OCZ Platinum

Nvidia 7800GT.

DFI NF4 SLI-DR mobo.

I have a 3.2 Ghz Sony Vaio with 2.gb of memory onboard. I use it for modeling networks using vmware and have had anything upto 10 different OS machines running at one go without any speed issues. So a pissy little media interface should not be an issue...

I have about 40gb of music. Connect Player used to just brick its self and go tits up when ever I tried to use it although SS 3.4 was OK. Its still had issues...

All of my music is stored with the artist_album_track_name as the title I ripped all of it myself using audiograbber. My Ipod never had any issues understanding the names and categorising the tracks.

With SonicStage I lose most of my music because the internal tags have not been set and as for gracenote If freeDB can find my track in less than a few seconds why does it take sooo long to get it wrong???

I also noticed that SS converted all my tracks on the player to OMG despite being set to LEAVE THEM ALONE

So I wiped the player clean and started again (what a total mistake that was.... it took 30 minutes to download 10 albums and then used gracenote to add tag data... It got most of them wrong and I am now faced with a load of tracks that should be jamiroquai labled as mozart

Yep Sonicstage sure is a great product....

And if a cheap ass mp3 player can sort out drag and drop what does it say for a £200 device that can't?