Wednesday, January 11, 2006

Product Review - Sony Walkman NWA3000 MP3 Player

So I've finally joined the "digital music revolution".

I've been intending to buy an MP3 Player for a while now. I've used my partner's IPod and been unimpressed with the sound quality and also put off by the fact that it's only able to play Apple's own music file format. Plus the fact that every Tom, Dick and Harry has one!

The Sony looks beautiful, sounds amazing, has simple intuitive controls and is an absolute joy to use so I'm really pleased I picked it ahead of the Apple and Creative options. Unfortuantely the Connect software really lets it down. I've had no problems transferring tracks from the PC to the player with it, other than that it takes a wee while to start up, but the problems occur when trying to rip CDs onto the PC. I find that it will rip a CD successfully into the library but then immediately hangs up and cannot be restarted. Even forcing it to quit through Task Manager seems to leave a lot of processes running so you have to reboot. The solution occured to me when Sony rolled out a firmware upgrade to the player, allowing it to play .WMA files. So now I rip all the CDs to the PC through Windows media player, and then import them to Connect and simply use that to transfer to the player itself. Slightly more fiddly but it seems to work well enough and it means I can get all my CDs onto it and start enjoying my music! I'm sure given time Sony will sort out the software glitches but for now this is a workaround that I'm happy with.