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 do the same - buy CDs, rip, archive CD away in a box as my backup. I don't delete though. I approach my huge collection as stuff I know I have, and who knows - sometimes I'll listen to something I haven't felt like hearing in a decade, so I like knowing it's there if I hunt for it.
I do agree with your post - the UI is bad. Even with the tiny buttons, a better UI would be nice. It seems to be designed for people with relatively small collections. I find this a lot - devices that market to audiophiles emphasize sound quality as all that matters, but often ignores that audiophiles may also have massive music collections. They usually suck on the "how does the audiophile organize and find the music they want to hear through that fancy expensive hardware" aspect.
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.
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.