Long story short: Is there any way I can play MP3s on an shitty Sony Atrac player without transfer software???
Backstory so nobody asks me the wrong questions: I’m trying to buy a birthday present for somebody that’s really dumb about computers… actually she doesn’t have a computer. She still uses a CD player, so I decided to introduce her to the 21st century with a digital player. I thought about getting an iPod, but it needs iTunes, which requires a computer that she doesn’t have. The plan was, when she goes to an Internet cafe, I’d mail her an address of my personal hosting site where I have mp3 albums… she could go to a cafe, download that album and transfer it to the drag-and-drop MP3 with no hassle.
So I read reviews on the Sony NWZ-S616. It lets you drag and drop mp3s, and the sound quality is high-rated. Since I’m in Japan, I go to the Japanese electronics store, and pick up what I thought was the exact same MP3 player. It IS the same player, but the model is NW-S616 (no Z), and that means it still fucks with Atrac and SonicStage. The store I bought it from, like most Japan electronic stores, doesn’t have a return policy. So I’m stuck with this POS, I ran out of time before the birthday to try mail-ordering a drag and drop player, and I don’t know of any player sold in Japan that doesn’t need transfer software.
I opened up the player’s mass storage/USB mode on my PC, and it just has an ‘OMGAUDIO’ (audio omg!) folder for music, as well as a PICTURE, VIDEO, MP_ROOT and DCIM folder. I tried running mass storage mode and creating a MUSIC folder, but the player doesn’t recognize any of the MP3s I dropped in that folder (even though the player automatically created a ‘NWWM_REC’ subfolder after I created the MUSIC folder). Now the weird thing is, you CAN directly d-&-d pictures, and video with sound (MP4+AAC), via USB mode.
Is there anything I can do to make this player useful or am I fucked?
PS. I don’t know if there’s an MP3 player thread but Search didn’t come up with anything.
Yes, the player won’t even display the mp3 file on the navigation screen…
Also, I tried to d&d an AAC-only music track to the VIDEO folder (since it’s playing the MP4+AAC video I created)… it will read the file, but it displays an error when I try to play it…
EDIT: And although I’m not exactly fluent in Japanese, this post I found on 2ch (post #9, totally in Japanese) suggests that you can put your own mp3s on this same model# player. There’s no point in making a custom mp3 from an original source if it’s just going to be encoded to Atrac on the player afterwards, right?
I don’t know anything about these players but it might be compatible with the same or similar firmware as the Z model, only changed so it doesn’t play mp3’s.
You might have to do a bit of research if this is possible or there may be a hacked firmware available that’ll do the job.
[rant/]yeah, compressed lossy media is so right now! Listen to those old codgers with their cds and their…gasp…records! I mean, you can totally hear all the music. It doesn’t sound all tinny and distorted. and they have full bass extension. all the sound isn’t compressed into the middle range, and the music is dynamic. wtf is up with that?[/rant]
i have a friend of mine who brings his i-pod everywhere and gets mad when i wont let him plug it into my car stereo. the reason i don’t let him is because the sound quality of mp3’s drives me nuts. maybe your friend isn’t quite as techno-backwards as you think she is. sorry for the rant, just trying to educate.
How cute. ‘Golden Ear’ dreams, centemptuous attitude even towards ‘friends’, standard ‘I can hear differences oscilloscopes and other instruments can’t detect’ audiophile wannabe superiority delusions FTL.
GTFO. Dude was trying to by a gift based on his knowledge of her life, and was even thoughtfull enough to do some research, find his mistake, and by the sound of it, keep it and eat the loss because it wasn’t as awesome as he hoped. THAT is what friends do, not get smug because the music she wants to listen to isn’t up to your imaginary buzzword standard.
most car stereos arnt even able to play the missing highs and lows from .wav to .mp3. most people cant even tell the difference between a .wav and .mp3. yes there is a difference but i really doubt that you would be able to tell on a car stereo. shit i can barely tell the difference on a high end stereo.
I used to have an extra slim Sony MP3/CD player that also played atrac. Overall the player was of high quality and the ability to play MP3 CD’s back 3 years ago was a plus. It was super slim and easy enough to just fit into my baggy pants or coat pocket at school and my friends just got a kick out of it because it looked slick as hell. Yet…that was also its downfall since it wasn’t very durable and the parts inside would break soon after purchasing it. You couldn’t drop it without fearing it not working anymore. I tried using the atrac feature on it for a bit but realized how much of a hassle it was since there wasn’t really any software to convert it back to MP3 files once you turned it into atrac. Well…that and I was too lazy to look for anything. I decided just to stick to making MP3 CD’s and didn’t really mess with the atrac stuff anymore. Just Sony’s way of forcing proprietary media down consumers throats.
Now they’ve cleaned up their act and just focus on their reputation for making high quality audio products. I decided to ditch CDs for my new MP3 player and went for the new NWZ A728 walkman. It’s sleek and slim, got a nice 2.5 inch screen, sound quality is great and the headphones that come with it are worth almost a 100 bucks and the entire player is less than 200 bucks. Because of less moving parts I’m sure it’ll end up being way more durable than my MP3/CD player. Over 30 hours of music playback on one charge is pretty sweet too. It’s got 8 gb of memory and with a little bit of converting, can put a good bit of video on there as well. I mainly got it for the music playing and it does that extremely well. Apparently people complain a lot about the lack of sound quality on Ipod players so its good to have a product that beats the big guys in what they should be doing best. Plus the best part is that they got rid of atrac so it’s much more free as far as the type of media you can play. You can even play itunes music if you wanted to.
If you ever do get another player for her I would suggest that one. Although the one you were trying to buy her is also a very good product from what I hear. The one I got is simply a higher end, sleeker model that comes with the best pair of stock headphones of any player out there.
I would say one of the issues with Sony still is that they label all of their walkmans simply by model number. Which makes it confusing for purchasers and probably led you to the situation you’re in now. They need to use less complicated names for their walkmans. The fact that I have to get technical and explain the model number to a friend who wants to buy the new Sony player I have is a little unnecessary. iPod fans have it a bit easier since all of their stuff is labeled with some kind of fancy name that keeps everyone from sounding like complete nerds or confusing themselves when talking about the products. With the new walkman I just bought…some websites it’s called the 8 GB Walkman (since it is technically the new series of walkmans) but there’s plenty of walkmans that have been created over the years and it would be real easy to confuse someone with which one I’m talking about. Sony makes a lot of fucking products though so I guess that’s there way of keeping track of them all.