Just Got Myself a Sony NW-A800 Today

Kintarō Hattori

Just picked up a Sony NW-A800 8GB today and wow it's impressive. Excellent screen quality, very easy to use, with easily navigable menu's, truely excellent sound quality etc.
So far I'm pretty impressed, though not so much so with having to use SonicStage, but it's so nice I'll forgive it for the moment.

30 hours for music is excellent and I'm very impressed by the claimed 8 hours for video.

pleasant Co.

how is sonic stage, some member here claims that it is now a solid piece of software with absolutely no bugs and that its speed has been ramped up, could you fill me in because I have tested out previous versions of the software, giving it many chances but it sucked so bad the last time I tried that I promised never to use it again.

Kintarō Hattori

Well so far I haven't run into any problems with it. It's easy to locate your music and put it on the player. It's pretty quick too. The only thing I don't like about the software is that if you want album art you have to through a fairly laborious process which slows things down a little.

To be fair I've only used it a little since I got it. It would seem that the software has been improved, but I resent having to use software to put music on, easpecially when photo's and video's are just drag and drop.

pleasant Co.

thanks for the info dude.

Sony recently release a UMS basic flash player, so you never know, maybe this will get a firmware update enabling UMS usage.

xenu

I bought this today and it's incredible, got a great quality feel to it and the screen resolution is mighty (as is the sound). Why would anybody buy a nano when you can buy this?! I saw the exact earphones that come bundled with this sold seperately - they cost €100!!!

Got a question for the OP, the only problem I'm having with SonicStage is the cover art - Is the function to search for the cover art on the internet pointless or am I missing something? The only way I seem to be able to get the cover art to stay on the album is by going into the album and then dragging and dropping a saved cover from amazon to the album box!!! Is that the way you do it too or is there a slightly easier way...or has my program got a bug?


....and I just realized this thread is a month old...

stpehenmc03

how much are these retailing for and where?

padi89

Nice looking player, if only Sony got rid of Sonic Stage....:(

pleasant Co.

padi89 wrote:

Nice looking player, if only Sony got rid of Sonic Stage....:(

There newest small flash player is UMS as well as a couple of PMP's they released in china, so the future looks bright

Dman001

I thought these supported Drag And Drop so you don't need to use Sonic Stage?

pleasant Co.

Dman001 wrote:

I thought these supported Drag And Drop so you don't need to use Sonic Stage?

Nope not these ones

padi89

Mactard wrote:

There newest small flash player is UMS as well as a couple of PMP's they released in china, so the future looks bright

Bright alright but still a long way behind the likes of iriver of cowan.Having said that from my experience Sony's hardware is excellent cant say the same for the other two......;)

pleasant Co.

padi89 wrote:

Bright alright but still a long way behind the likes of iriver of cowan.Having said that from my experience Sony's hardware is excellent cant say the same for the other two......;)

I always had issues with sony DAP's being too quite, damn EU regulation being overly enforced .
Cowon are fantastic, truly one of the better companies out there.
irivers new stuff is/are nice, like the clix2 and w10.

rabbitinlights

Sonicstage killed Bambi's mother.

The reason it used to take so long to transfer files was that it was actually converting it to that Atrac format..... wonder if thats still the case.

S.

Kintarō Hattori

xenu wrote:

Got a question for the OP, the only problem I'm having with SonicStage is the cover art - Is the function to search for the cover art on the internet pointless or am I missing something? The only way I seem to be able to get the cover art to stay on the album is by going into the album and then dragging and dropping a saved cover from amazon to the album box!!! Is that the way you do it too or is there a slightly easier way...or has my program got a bug?

Sonicstage is a pain, although the latst versions are CONSIDERABLY better than it's previous incarnations. Sometimes it gets the covert art right, sometimes it doesn't. Your's isn't broken, it's just that sony can't engineer software! I've had to do the amazon thing myself numerous times.

Kintarō Hattori

rabbitinlights wrote:

Sonicstage killed Bambi's mother.

The reason it used to take so long to transfer files was that it was actually converting it to that Atrac format..... wonder if thats still the case.

S.

I don't believe so as the player gives you the option of looking at the file information when your playing a song and it reports it as an MP3. I think Sony are slow to realise things, but they seem to have realised that ATRAC has had it's day hence they stopped the whole MP3 into Atrac thing a while back.

pleasant Co.

eo980 wrote:

I think Sony are slow to realise things, but they seem to have realised that ATRAC has had it's day

This is true, sony have now adopted AAC as their "home" format (which they helped develop btw) Sony's absolute newest players do not support atrac.