Regarding the interface: no. I bought one of these and regretted it ever since.
It may well be better than the competition currently, but it is still got a shitty interface that demands your attention for anything. Small example: to switch off you have to press and hold the off button (edit: a few seconds), then it pops up a modal but asks you whether you really want to turn it off. Err, yes please?
The 'off' button at the top is actually well engineered you can't hit it by accident, it's hard to hold in and you have to do it for several seconds. I don't want to a confirmation dialog popping up that when I'm getting off a bus. It isn't needed.
The damn thing demand your attention all the time. I used to have an Archos, I could navigated using its clunky front-the lever without looking. Not with this you can't. You have to concentrate.
The buttons shown on the side are too small to feel unless you concentrate (the smaller ones are ~2mm wide, the volume 'bar' is thankfully usable after a bit of practice).
There's other problems with it - turn it on? Pretty animation + almost a minute startup time before it's ready. Unplug it from charging, it remains on despite going blank, on standby, looking like it turned itself off - come to use it in a few days, it's gone flat - "but I just charged it, what happened?".
It's beautifully well-made in hardware, sound is really great, the UI... I bloody hate navigating the music on it. It's an absolute pain in the arse. Bring back proper user interfaces, not touch screens. You know, with user testing.
It's a lovely bit of kit that I just don't want to use.
Also Sony's preinstalled music app is the worst I've ever seen. It cannot create/edit playlists or playback queues. It can only delete playlists, and whenever you do that the app will interrupt music playback for a second. It can only display album cover thumbnails if their resolution is around 80x80 or lower.
Thanks to Android it's possible to install alternatives, but a more lightweight system would have been preferrable.
It can only charge the battery while switched on. The last time the battery was at 15% when I plugged it in, and the Walkman instantly booted up Android, draining the battery to 7% before it started charging. I do not know what happens if the battery charge isn't enough to boot up the OS and I'm too afraid to try.
It's a really neat device and I like using it, but it has so many puzzling quirks.
Electronics are getting more 'needy' all the time. Try switching off a modern TV, it requires three or four steps in sequence or you can start all over again. In the good old days you just hit the 'off' button and that was it.
Ditto for navigation, in car systems (the designers of non-tactile systems deserve a special place in hell and hopefully their victims don't haunt them in person), phones and so on. They all seem to thrive on your attention instead of just getting the job done and staying out of the way otherwise.
It would be worthwhile if some companies would just be willing to minimally invest into an open-source version of their interface and a safe way for developers and hardcore users to update their devices without bricking them.
It might go nowhere, but if they're lucky, some really good interface ideas might pop up that could then be incorporated into the official product. This Walkman line and its embedded software has a relatively long lifespan, so a lot of people might benefit from improvements.
Was looking at DAPS in this price range towards the end of 2019 - ended up going with a Fiio X5 III. Many of your Sony concerns are present in it: really poor menu/nav design, slow startup - but excellent sound quality.
I am mostly confused by what the author thinks the selling point is.
> I can’t describe what a breath of fresh air this is compared to how bad modern smartphone music and streaming apps have become.
Well, I was hoping they would try to describe it, because personally, I would have to wear my most deeply shaded nostalgia glasses to think that MP3 player UX has ever been comparable to what Spotify offers nowadays.
And we can not even directly compare a MP3 player to Spotify, which is paid to do an entirely different and way more complicated job, considering that you are able to browse and organize a completely different and incomparably larger (and automatically growing) set of media.
In the end, this feels like a case of someone convincing themselves of a peculiar diet, where the believe in its effectiveness does all the heavy lifting. Which is great, when it works for that person – but probably not applicable in general and likely worse than the market solution.
> MP3 player UX has ever been comparable to what Spotify offers nowadays.
You might have different experiences to me.
My iPod was never a distraction whilst driving in the way that Spotify, with it's manifold failure modes and inconsistent/unresponsive UX, can be.
With depressing regularity I drive without either music or podcasts because that's preferable to dying (or killing someone else) in a car crash because I'm fussing with Spotify after it's crapped out in some weird way yet again.
Again, not a problem I ever had with my iPod. I know they do crash occasionally - happened to a friend - but I can't remember a single incident in the 7 - 8 years I used mine regularly (multiple hours, every day) where it crashed.
Spotify is terrible software to the point of being dangerous. I can't see how that is desirable UX.
> but probably not applicable in general and likely worse than the market solution.
Worse, for which usecase?
I as a musician like to listen to full albums (as opposed to single songs) I like to manually read up on music and then listen to that specific music from that specific world region and era. Spotify can be neat to discover some starting points for that search, but it is arguably shit at the listening experience I am looking for. For people who don't care so much about what is playing in the background it is certainly doing a good job tho.
I need to listen a lot to mixes and recordings as well, and an MP3 player certainly has an easier UX for that, than the typical phone - plug it in and copy over. How would you do that on spotify? I use a nextcloud sync setup, which works — but setting that up to work flawlessly with your audio-player app (e.g. poweramp) can be a bit tricky at times.
So yeah, Spotify ftw. if you convinced yourself of that peculiar diet, to use your words.
I don't remember any of the MP3 players desperately trying to shove podcast down my throat instead of showing my music. They also never lost all my downloaded music in the first 30 minutes of an 11 hour flight due to a crash bug.
> And we can not even directly compare a MP3 player to Spotify, which is paid to do an entirely different and way more complicated job, considering that you are able to browse and organize a completely different and incomparably larger (and automatically growing) set of media.
Spotify has two drawbacks though: you need a constant Internet connection and it removes tracks at will. The constant internet connection can be solved by downloading media to the device, but the fact that some tracks (even whole albums) can become unavailable suddenly is utterly disappointing. This is the reason I keep buying CDs. Spotify is an amazing tool to listen on the go but whenever I feel a real connection (no pun intended) with an artist's music, I have to buy their art in a physical format.
> I am mostly confused by what the author thinks the selling point is.
-------------------
From the article:
> You don’t need to use any special desktop software; you mount the Walkman as a USB storage device and transfer files. Wait… that’s it? Yes!
>The player indexes any music you add, but keeps the files in place. This lets me use rsync to regularly diff and copy new ripped CDs or downloaded tracks across, even on FreeBSD. It also decouples syncing from music organising, so no more finagling iTunes in Wine, or using the garbage new macOS Music.app. As a (diagnosed) OCD suffer, this literally makes me happier than it should.
----------
These are features I had in my MP3 player about the time the first iPod came out (looked like a thumbdrive with a couple of buttons and a 2-line LCD screen on its side). Features I highly prefer, along with the fact that no internet connection is required at any time. I'm not looking for a device to be the front end for Spotify, Apple, or any other service - just an MP3 player that lets me play podcasts, music, lectures, etc. - e.g., any audio file that I want to, ideally in most of the common audio formats (including ogg).
The ability of such players to be operated blindly, and to give audio feedback on operations, is a major advantage. Then also the pocketability, compared to today’s huge phones. Lastly, being distraction-free because they are dedicated to sound file playback. No internet, no ads, no hit-and-miss recommendations, no connection issues. Just play what you know you have and like. It’s a simpler life where you have full control.
> Well, I was hoping they would try to describe it, because personally, I would have to wear my most deeply shaded nostalgia glasses to
Leaving aside the UI issues (most of which can be alleviated with hardware buttons having tactile indicators like bumps / different sizes etc), my core concern is you are leaving not just the preservation job (prey none of the albums/songs gets deleted after an IP right renegotiation) but the curation job to Spotify.
I don't want that. Curation is the most important thing even. I carefully select the albums I want to listen to. I don't ever want software to try to guess my tastes or fill in the blanks when the playlist is over.
It might be good for Spotify as they can show better stats (more tracks listened to, more engagement, whatever) but it's not for me as I'd rather have audio stop to let me take another decision about what I want to listen to: I care about my own experience much more than Spotify might.
Spotify has an opportunity here to sell a hi quality portable player with a good DAC and headphones amp.
It's obviously a niche product, but if they started streaming in FLAC and paired it with their own audiophile player, it would be a fantastic marketing stunt they would probably turn a profit by selling the devices. God knows what audiophiles do to be able to listen to audio on the go with a good DAC and amp.
I want to listen to my music, the music I've bought, not what spotify throws at me. I'm currently using Youtube Music because it at least lets me store and play my music collection, even though it tries to push me toward the streaming options.
I too assumed that dedicated MP3 players were relegated to very low-budget devices, and I didn't realize that Sony was still producing the Walkman line. I decided to take a look at their line up to what was happening in the space - https://electronics.sony.com/audio/walkman-digital-recorders...
Boy... what a massive range of prices. There's a touchscreen-less device for $75, one resembling the one described by the author at $350, an $850 model with different chassis and higher output but nothing else I can immediately see, and then models jumping up to $1100, $1400, $3200 (!), and even $3600 (!!!) which is apparently made out of a gold-plated copper. I was vaguely interested in such a product but even $350 seemed too much, let alone the other ranges of products with, for the general audience, not much in the way of obvious differing benefits.
One thing to factor in is the longevity of these devices, they aren’t an 18month affair like the typical smartphone. Battery aside, I have an original Zune that boots right up, and an unmodified iPod Mini with 4GB of spinning metal that doesn’t skip a beat, that’s about 17 or 18 years gone by, people also offer them on eBay spec’d out with upgraded battery, memory, and DACs
> I was vaguely interested in such a product but even $350 seemed too much, let alone the other ranges of products with, for the general audience, not much in the way of obvious differing benefits.
I was also skeptical, but after hearing the difference, I'm not coming back. I'm rediscovering my favorite tracks! I'm hearing instruments in the background that I couldn't hear before!!
> even $3600 (!!!) which is apparently made out of a gold-plated copper
TBH I don't care much about gold, but 40h battery life? That speaks to me. And if there's as much of an audible difference as I got from my middle range NW-Z507, I'll be happy to spend $3600 on an item that brings me happiness every single day.
One thing no "new" mp3 player has done correctly is audio books. None of them do bookmarking as well as rockbox. Also, new mp3 players usually have terrible battery life. Because of these reasons, I bought myself about 7 sandisk sansa players on ebay and have gotten very good at fixing their shitty headphone jack problem.
With a rockboxed sansa I get about 60 hours of battery life and bookmarking on stop with a list of recent bookmarks per file.
Can this sony do any of that? Hardware music player have gone down hill.
I'm surprised there hasn't been a successful open hardware project for a portable music player. Rockbox, a low power SoC, some decent DAC, a basic display - epaper would be kind of neat - and preferably a standard battery - something like the Nokia BL-5C.
I have a Rockboxed Sansa Clip+. I like that I can set it to turn off automatically, so I can fall asleep listening and not have it play all night. I also like that it will pick up right where I left off the last time. That's nice for podcasts and books. I suppose that might be what you meant by bookmarking.
You can buy a one-foot 3.5 mm extension cord with a right angle plug for a few dollars to avoid repeatedly stressing the jack.
The pre-Android Sony Walkmans (like the NW-A55 mentioned above) have decent battery life. I typically get around 30 hours from my SONY NW-A45. In a world where many modern “audiophile” players only get 8-10 hours of playback, that’s not bad.
However, they really are terrible for podcasts and audiobooks. There aren’t any real bookmarking features to speak of. For that, I use a Rockbox-compatible player (my preference is for a refurbished old HDD-based iPod with a new battery and SD card storage).
I can’t describe what a breath of fresh air this is compared to how bad modern smartphone music and streaming apps have become. It’s also nice having a dedicated player that isn’t inundated with notifications and other modern distractions.
Until you see something done well, we get seduced by "features" and loose track of how nice a really well design thing can be. (Got to hand it to old Apple, they did know design.)
I got one of the NW-A45 Walkmans a few years ago - it's pretty nice and similar to the A55. Good audio quality, but most of all, it lets me focus on music without temptation to do things I would do on a phone.
My biggest gripes are the interface.
- It takes forever to rebuild its database when I add new music to the SD card. No matter how much I searched, I couldn't figure out how to build this myself on the computer side when I added music.
- Creating playlists isn't possible. You can add to existing playlists, but if you want new ones you need to add them from the computer side. I did find that if I add a skeleton playlist file to the SD card I can add to it on device, but that means I need to plan ahead for what playlists I'm going to want.
- Navigating is a pain when you have a big collection. I collect live music, so sometimes I have hundreds of "albums" for a given artist. It's painful to find what I want.
The inconvenience of using it has led me to usually leave it at home and fall back to the Music app on my iPhone and use iTunes Match to shove all of the music up into the cloud after I've transcoded it from lossless to a smaller lossy form. I know lots of people hate that app, but so far it's the only one that I can fly around in my 90k+ song collection with. I'm always on the lookout for better ones, or better dedicated devices, but so far no luck finding one that isn't a pain to use.
Yep; see my other post. Let me add one to this, perhaps it affects you?
I'm fussy about what I like, I buy a CD, rip, and listen. Usually I want to throw that track away after a few listens. You can't delete the track you are listening to (you can sort of, depending on how you found it via the UI, but usually you can't) so you must remember to delete it at home on your main computer. That's a major feature for me and it messes that up.
I've been looking with some interest at the NW Walkmans for several years, and as far as I know, the whole range still missing queue functionality. It's strange to me whoever is in charge for the product line at Sony doesn't seem to be interested in adding or improving pretty basic player functionality like playlists and play queues. It's almost as if they invested into the hardware platform, then called it quits instead of naturally evolving the software side.
I use a dedicated voice recorder to think while I walk. It has made a world of difference in my thinking. And no, a phone with an app is not the same. A button you can press anytime that just records is a godsent. No notifications, no chats, no Trillion dollar companies giving you dopamine shots.
Your attention is too valuable. We are squandering it on devices that are designed so you can't think clearly.
This used to be available in the United States for purchase. I have one, and bought it in 2020 from Best Buy for $170. [0] Good to know it's still available in Japan, but it's a shame it doesn't seem to be in stock in the US anymore since it's a fantastic player. It's free from all the smartphone bloat and runs a slick interface on vanilla linux (and works just fine with linux as USB mass storage device, as well as an FM radio receiver, and a bluetooth client/host).
That there is no wifi in my mind is a feature rather than a bug.
I also like to think that model name is an homage to the hip hop group, N.W.A. :-P
Curiosity question: has anyone done any work on reverse-engineering the Sony Mega Bass feature they used to have on old analog players (and ported to some early MP3 ones)? It sounded so much deeper than any phone/sound card would give. I'm wondering if it's some purely analog schenanigans (some tricky extra capacitors?) or if it can be replicated in pure software.
I took my music collection offline at the start of this year, so I would lose my final reason to "need" to carry a smartphone around. It took me about 16 hours over two days to plan, organize and acquire all the music I would otherwise have listened to on Spotify.
In the end the experience was far inferior. My wireless earphones were harder to manage and connect, the UI and build quality were outright unpleasant ($40 price tag, wasn't willing to spend more), and podcasts wouldn't save the point I last stopped at. Not only that, but the MP3 player didn't recognize the track number from within the MP3 data, meaning that albums were played with the tracks in alphabetical order, until I found a program that could change the file names to contain said number at the start of the file name.
The problem was clearly the really crappy MP3 player I got, but I couldn't find anything better that was reasonably priced in the market available to me in Europe. If I could find something then I'd love to give it another shot.
Sandisk makes a line of budget players, that while inferior in many aspects, excel in at least one major area over most competitors: they all have physical buttons, not a touch screen. For a music player, this is a must, because it lets you pause/play, fastforward/rewind, skip track go back, raise/lower volume without having to actually look at the screen.
I clip mine to the inside of my left pants pocket, and other than track selection, I can operate the entire thing without having to look at it.
>> But the audio quality is a noticeable upgrade from my iPhone 8
Is this still true with latest iPhone? I would expect that iPhone hardware is not a limiting factor for audio quality (assuming a wired adaptor for HiFi headphones)
> The NW-A55 is part of Sony’s budget digital audio player lineup. ... It worked out about AU $300 including shipping, not bad considering how expensive iPods and cassette Walkmans used to be.
We must have very different definitions of "budget" because 200 EUR for MP3 player is nowhere close to budget line in times when you can buy decent budget phones for that money or how much I spent for great cassette Panasonic walkman. He is also comparing prices of technology at peak with price of technology pretty much nobody buys anymore and they should be giving pretty much for free.
Btw 16GB model having 12.26GB available capacity I'd expect from some Android phone and not dumb MP3 player.
It's crazy that we have come there, but reading this I am actually entertaining buying one.
It is shocking how bad the experience of listening to my own music has become on iphones. Dongles (different for ipads and iphone of course), itunes for windows is barely usable, there is a bug they never fixed where the music player on iOS randomly mismatch the album artwork, and there are so many conflicting gestures that I always end up messing what I am trying to do. And like a year ago an OS update auto-decreases the volume if it deems I am listening too loud. Android isn't an option for me because Google.
But it's a pain to have to carry two devices, manage two batteries.
The death of Google Play Music sent me down a similar path. I fired up my old 3rd gen ipod touch and synced it up with my old iTunes collection. It was jarring missing out on a decade of UX development, but it's been a breath of fresh air being able to just.... manage your music collection and play the music you want to play. No ads, no playing something I didn't ask for. ITunes on windows is really nice today. Older CDs are super cheap, and my family is often happy to offload their old CDs to me.
It's also helped me rediscover a lot of old music from my formative years. If I had to choose between my old favorites and all the new neat stuff I've found on Spotify, I would choose the old stuff! And I can still pull out my phone for those occasions I want something on Spotify, but if that happens enough, I buy the CD and it gets loaded into the collection.
It even sent me down a rabbit hole of getting a home stereo again. It's so nice leaving music playing in our living room.
For music on the go, iTunes makes it dead simple to copy/paste playlists onto my android phone's storage.
Probably over a decade ago my wife bought me a Sony Walkman MP3 player for Christmas, and even though I ended up going with something that was Audible.com friendly, I was so impressed with the earbuds' quality I've sourced them a couple of times so I have a lifetime supply at this point. (If interested, I think the model number was MDR-EX082)
Got a Fiio. Never trust Sony anymore after the forced Atrac-nonsense in almost every device: it would only play MP3 after being converted to an Atrac-file. After they blocked my Sony PSN account it is Never again Sony.
I love my Sony NWZ-A15¹. My whole music collection fits on a 128 GB SD card. I always found streaming apps lacking. Spotify's UX is atrocious. I also don't think that their recommendation algorithms work well. There's also a huge gap in availability of non-mainstream recordings in most streaming services.
I enjoy high quality audio, but I use my phone. If you get a Quboz or Tidal 24/96 subscription then as long as you take care of the DAC and speakers/headphones you've got a great chain. Rather then buying a Sony digital audio player, you could spend that money on a good set of Sony headphones - assuming you already own the requisite phone. And in the house, you can build a very high performance audio setup for about £200 via hifiberry, avoiding the bonkers price of hires hi-fis.
[+] [-] zasdffaa|3 years ago|reply
It may well be better than the competition currently, but it is still got a shitty interface that demands your attention for anything. Small example: to switch off you have to press and hold the off button (edit: a few seconds), then it pops up a modal but asks you whether you really want to turn it off. Err, yes please? The 'off' button at the top is actually well engineered you can't hit it by accident, it's hard to hold in and you have to do it for several seconds. I don't want to a confirmation dialog popping up that when I'm getting off a bus. It isn't needed.
The damn thing demand your attention all the time. I used to have an Archos, I could navigated using its clunky front-the lever without looking. Not with this you can't. You have to concentrate.
The buttons shown on the side are too small to feel unless you concentrate (the smaller ones are ~2mm wide, the volume 'bar' is thankfully usable after a bit of practice).
There's other problems with it - turn it on? Pretty animation + almost a minute startup time before it's ready. Unplug it from charging, it remains on despite going blank, on standby, looking like it turned itself off - come to use it in a few days, it's gone flat - "but I just charged it, what happened?".
It's beautifully well-made in hardware, sound is really great, the UI... I bloody hate navigating the music on it. It's an absolute pain in the arse. Bring back proper user interfaces, not touch screens. You know, with user testing.
It's a lovely bit of kit that I just don't want to use.
Rant over.
[+] [-] alpaca128|3 years ago|reply
It can only charge the battery while switched on. The last time the battery was at 15% when I plugged it in, and the Walkman instantly booted up Android, draining the battery to 7% before it started charging. I do not know what happens if the battery charge isn't enough to boot up the OS and I'm too afraid to try.
It's a really neat device and I like using it, but it has so many puzzling quirks.
[+] [-] jacquesm|3 years ago|reply
Ditto for navigation, in car systems (the designers of non-tactile systems deserve a special place in hell and hopefully their victims don't haunt them in person), phones and so on. They all seem to thrive on your attention instead of just getting the job done and staying out of the way otherwise.
[+] [-] theodric|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wvh|3 years ago|reply
It might go nowhere, but if they're lucky, some really good interface ideas might pop up that could then be incorporated into the official product. This Walkman line and its embedded software has a relatively long lifespan, so a lot of people might benefit from improvements.
[+] [-] noxvilleza|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jstummbillig|3 years ago|reply
> I can’t describe what a breath of fresh air this is compared to how bad modern smartphone music and streaming apps have become.
Well, I was hoping they would try to describe it, because personally, I would have to wear my most deeply shaded nostalgia glasses to think that MP3 player UX has ever been comparable to what Spotify offers nowadays.
And we can not even directly compare a MP3 player to Spotify, which is paid to do an entirely different and way more complicated job, considering that you are able to browse and organize a completely different and incomparably larger (and automatically growing) set of media.
In the end, this feels like a case of someone convincing themselves of a peculiar diet, where the believe in its effectiveness does all the heavy lifting. Which is great, when it works for that person – but probably not applicable in general and likely worse than the market solution.
[+] [-] bartread|3 years ago|reply
You might have different experiences to me.
My iPod was never a distraction whilst driving in the way that Spotify, with it's manifold failure modes and inconsistent/unresponsive UX, can be.
With depressing regularity I drive without either music or podcasts because that's preferable to dying (or killing someone else) in a car crash because I'm fussing with Spotify after it's crapped out in some weird way yet again.
Again, not a problem I ever had with my iPod. I know they do crash occasionally - happened to a friend - but I can't remember a single incident in the 7 - 8 years I used mine regularly (multiple hours, every day) where it crashed.
Spotify is terrible software to the point of being dangerous. I can't see how that is desirable UX.
[+] [-] atoav|3 years ago|reply
Worse, for which usecase?
I as a musician like to listen to full albums (as opposed to single songs) I like to manually read up on music and then listen to that specific music from that specific world region and era. Spotify can be neat to discover some starting points for that search, but it is arguably shit at the listening experience I am looking for. For people who don't care so much about what is playing in the background it is certainly doing a good job tho.
I need to listen a lot to mixes and recordings as well, and an MP3 player certainly has an easier UX for that, than the typical phone - plug it in and copy over. How would you do that on spotify? I use a nextcloud sync setup, which works — but setting that up to work flawlessly with your audio-player app (e.g. poweramp) can be a bit tricky at times.
So yeah, Spotify ftw. if you convinced yourself of that peculiar diet, to use your words.
[+] [-] izacus|3 years ago|reply
So just in those simple ways Spotify is worse.
[+] [-] fbnlsr|3 years ago|reply
Spotify has two drawbacks though: you need a constant Internet connection and it removes tracks at will. The constant internet connection can be solved by downloading media to the device, but the fact that some tracks (even whole albums) can become unavailable suddenly is utterly disappointing. This is the reason I keep buying CDs. Spotify is an amazing tool to listen on the go but whenever I feel a real connection (no pun intended) with an artist's music, I have to buy their art in a physical format.
[+] [-] IgniteTheSun|3 years ago|reply
-------------------
From the article:
> You don’t need to use any special desktop software; you mount the Walkman as a USB storage device and transfer files. Wait… that’s it? Yes!
>The player indexes any music you add, but keeps the files in place. This lets me use rsync to regularly diff and copy new ripped CDs or downloaded tracks across, even on FreeBSD. It also decouples syncing from music organising, so no more finagling iTunes in Wine, or using the garbage new macOS Music.app. As a (diagnosed) OCD suffer, this literally makes me happier than it should.
----------
These are features I had in my MP3 player about the time the first iPod came out (looked like a thumbdrive with a couple of buttons and a 2-line LCD screen on its side). Features I highly prefer, along with the fact that no internet connection is required at any time. I'm not looking for a device to be the front end for Spotify, Apple, or any other service - just an MP3 player that lets me play podcasts, music, lectures, etc. - e.g., any audio file that I want to, ideally in most of the common audio formats (including ogg).
[Edited for format.]
[+] [-] cush|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] layer8|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] csdvrx|3 years ago|reply
Leaving aside the UI issues (most of which can be alleviated with hardware buttons having tactile indicators like bumps / different sizes etc), my core concern is you are leaving not just the preservation job (prey none of the albums/songs gets deleted after an IP right renegotiation) but the curation job to Spotify.
I don't want that. Curation is the most important thing even. I carefully select the albums I want to listen to. I don't ever want software to try to guess my tastes or fill in the blanks when the playlist is over.
It might be good for Spotify as they can show better stats (more tracks listened to, more engagement, whatever) but it's not for me as I'd rather have audio stop to let me take another decision about what I want to listen to: I care about my own experience much more than Spotify might.
[+] [-] pier25|3 years ago|reply
It's obviously a niche product, but if they started streaming in FLAC and paired it with their own audiophile player, it would be a fantastic marketing stunt they would probably turn a profit by selling the devices. God knows what audiophiles do to be able to listen to audio on the go with a good DAC and amp.
[+] [-] lambic|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aquova|3 years ago|reply
Boy... what a massive range of prices. There's a touchscreen-less device for $75, one resembling the one described by the author at $350, an $850 model with different chassis and higher output but nothing else I can immediately see, and then models jumping up to $1100, $1400, $3200 (!), and even $3600 (!!!) which is apparently made out of a gold-plated copper. I was vaguely interested in such a product but even $350 seemed too much, let alone the other ranges of products with, for the general audience, not much in the way of obvious differing benefits.
[+] [-] rtpg|3 years ago|reply
Give me a dedicated interface if you’re gonna charge me that much for a dedicated device! At least comparable to an iPod nano in “time to play mp3”
[+] [-] jazzyjackson|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] csdvrx|3 years ago|reply
I was also skeptical, but after hearing the difference, I'm not coming back. I'm rediscovering my favorite tracks! I'm hearing instruments in the background that I couldn't hear before!!
> even $3600 (!!!) which is apparently made out of a gold-plated copper
TBH I don't care much about gold, but 40h battery life? That speaks to me. And if there's as much of an audible difference as I got from my middle range NW-Z507, I'll be happy to spend $3600 on an item that brings me happiness every single day.
[+] [-] BirAdam|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mkoryak|3 years ago|reply
With a rockboxed sansa I get about 60 hours of battery life and bookmarking on stop with a list of recent bookmarks per file.
Can this sony do any of that? Hardware music player have gone down hill.
[+] [-] t0mas88|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bpye|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] visiblink|3 years ago|reply
You can buy a one-foot 3.5 mm extension cord with a right angle plug for a few dollars to avoid repeatedly stressing the jack.
[+] [-] marlor|3 years ago|reply
However, they really are terrible for podcasts and audiobooks. There aren’t any real bookmarking features to speak of. For that, I use a Rockbox-compatible player (my preference is for a refurbished old HDD-based iPod with a new battery and SD card storage).
[+] [-] agumonkey|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulcarroty|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drpixie|3 years ago|reply
Until you see something done well, we get seduced by "features" and loose track of how nice a really well design thing can be. (Got to hand it to old Apple, they did know design.)
[+] [-] porcoda|3 years ago|reply
My biggest gripes are the interface.
- It takes forever to rebuild its database when I add new music to the SD card. No matter how much I searched, I couldn't figure out how to build this myself on the computer side when I added music.
- Creating playlists isn't possible. You can add to existing playlists, but if you want new ones you need to add them from the computer side. I did find that if I add a skeleton playlist file to the SD card I can add to it on device, but that means I need to plan ahead for what playlists I'm going to want.
- Navigating is a pain when you have a big collection. I collect live music, so sometimes I have hundreds of "albums" for a given artist. It's painful to find what I want.
The inconvenience of using it has led me to usually leave it at home and fall back to the Music app on my iPhone and use iTunes Match to shove all of the music up into the cloud after I've transcoded it from lossless to a smaller lossy form. I know lots of people hate that app, but so far it's the only one that I can fly around in my 90k+ song collection with. I'm always on the lookout for better ones, or better dedicated devices, but so far no luck finding one that isn't a pain to use.
[+] [-] zasdffaa|3 years ago|reply
I'm fussy about what I like, I buy a CD, rip, and listen. Usually I want to throw that track away after a few listens. You can't delete the track you are listening to (you can sort of, depending on how you found it via the UI, but usually you can't) so you must remember to delete it at home on your main computer. That's a major feature for me and it messes that up.
[+] [-] wvh|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] urlwolf|3 years ago|reply
Your attention is too valuable. We are squandering it on devices that are designed so you can't think clearly.
[+] [-] nicklaf|3 years ago|reply
That there is no wifi in my mind is a feature rather than a bug.
I also like to think that model name is an homage to the hip hop group, N.W.A. :-P
[0] https://www.bestbuy.com/site/sony-walkman-nw-a55-hi-res-16gb...
[+] [-] UkrainianJew|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] csdvrx|3 years ago|reply
If you have a full Sony setup (walkman + headphones) DSEE Extreme sounds just like that, and seems to be purely software.
One of my "tests" is to run my favorite Pavarotti rendition of Verdi's La donna e mobile - with DSEE Extreme on, it's night and day.
However, on my normal FLACs, it's far less important.
Some people even dislike it: https://www.reddit.com/r/sony/comments/ipcqf9/dsee_extreme_o...
[+] [-] fortran77|3 years ago|reply
I’ve played pipe organs that do the same thing with “resultant” stops to fake 32’ or 64’ stops.
[+] [-] thekingofrome|3 years ago|reply
In the end the experience was far inferior. My wireless earphones were harder to manage and connect, the UI and build quality were outright unpleasant ($40 price tag, wasn't willing to spend more), and podcasts wouldn't save the point I last stopped at. Not only that, but the MP3 player didn't recognize the track number from within the MP3 data, meaning that albums were played with the tracks in alphabetical order, until I found a program that could change the file names to contain said number at the start of the file name.
The problem was clearly the really crappy MP3 player I got, but I couldn't find anything better that was reasonably priced in the market available to me in Europe. If I could find something then I'd love to give it another shot.
[+] [-] wg4t3464y4|3 years ago|reply
I clip mine to the inside of my left pants pocket, and other than track selection, I can operate the entire thing without having to look at it.
[+] [-] erwincoumans|3 years ago|reply
Is this still true with latest iPhone? I would expect that iPhone hardware is not a limiting factor for audio quality (assuming a wired adaptor for HiFi headphones)
[+] [-] Markoff|3 years ago|reply
We must have very different definitions of "budget" because 200 EUR for MP3 player is nowhere close to budget line in times when you can buy decent budget phones for that money or how much I spent for great cassette Panasonic walkman. He is also comparing prices of technology at peak with price of technology pretty much nobody buys anymore and they should be giving pretty much for free.
Btw 16GB model having 12.26GB available capacity I'd expect from some Android phone and not dumb MP3 player.
[+] [-] cm2187|3 years ago|reply
It is shocking how bad the experience of listening to my own music has become on iphones. Dongles (different for ipads and iphone of course), itunes for windows is barely usable, there is a bug they never fixed where the music player on iOS randomly mismatch the album artwork, and there are so many conflicting gestures that I always end up messing what I am trying to do. And like a year ago an OS update auto-decreases the volume if it deems I am listening too loud. Android isn't an option for me because Google.
But it's a pain to have to carry two devices, manage two batteries.
[+] [-] locofocos|3 years ago|reply
It's also helped me rediscover a lot of old music from my formative years. If I had to choose between my old favorites and all the new neat stuff I've found on Spotify, I would choose the old stuff! And I can still pull out my phone for those occasions I want something on Spotify, but if that happens enough, I buy the CD and it gets loaded into the collection.
It even sent me down a rabbit hole of getting a home stereo again. It's so nice leaving music playing in our living room.
For music on the go, iTunes makes it dead simple to copy/paste playlists onto my android phone's storage.
[+] [-] 13of40|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pcmoney|3 years ago|reply
If the audio quality isn’t better why is it so much better than the “bad” subscription services?
I understand critiques of how little they pay artists but I mean from a customer perspective, why is spotify et al bad?
I assume you have to buy download organize and sync the music for this system?
Is it just nostalgia? Just a single purpose device that cant text you etc?
[+] [-] gbraad|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CamperBob2|3 years ago|reply
One of my most cherished personal mottoes: "If the answer involves giving money to Sony, you asked the wrong question."
[+] [-] tsak|3 years ago|reply
¹ https://www.sony.co.uk/electronics/support/digital-music-pla...
[+] [-] binbag|3 years ago|reply