Sony NW-HD1 20 GB Network Walkman Digital Music Player Review

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(More customer reviews)From a hardware perspective, it's a work of art. Beautiful, sleek, lightweight, and solid feeling. I got it in my hands and fell in love. And then I tried to use it. Which required installing SonicStage. I'd read all the bad reviews of SonicStage, and I'd used (what I thought was) equally bad Sony software in the past -- OpenMG for their NetMD player, for example. So I was prepared for some annoyances, fine tuning, maybe occassional bugs. I also assumed the people who complained were exaggerating about how bad it was. LET ME PROMISE YOU -- THEY WERE NOT. In almost twenty years of using computer software, tinkering with electronics, owning some version of almost every gadget known to man -- I have never seen such a promising piece of hardware CRIPPLED by such a buggy, ill-conceived, underpowered, unintuitive piece of software. It's WORSE than what people are telling you. It's so bad that I ended up returning mine and buying an Ipod -- something I swore I'd never do. The user interface isn't even consistent between the player and the software. There's no way to shuffle all the songs on the drive. User support is non-existent. SonicStage freezes and crashes for no reason, despite being upgraded to latest version and uninstalled/reinstalled. Certain songs won't transfer, others are marked as having no digital rights (even though they were tracks recorded from the same albums as other songs that transferred fine -- and that NEVER had digital rights assigned to them in the first place.) A lot of people have complained about Sony forcing you to use their proprietary ATRAC3 format instead of MP3. Honestly -- that's the LEAST of this unit's problems. The bigger problem is that the software engineers are too incompetent to program a stable program that will actually CONVERT and MANAGE those ATRAC3's. Sony's hardware engineers created this beautiful player, and their software engineers will be the cause of its failure. Words cannot do justice to how badly Sony bungled this mess. It kills me to say this, but don't waste your time.
**NEW ADDITION: To the reviewers who make comments to the effect that anyone who has problems with SonicStage software either has a faulty computer or is a complete idiot: Have you actually tried to USE the software? Or do you just sort of sit and stare at the pretty pictures on the screen? (I mean, come on. Nobody's arguing that the hardware is extremely impressive, but the software is buggy, unintuitive, and inconsistent. It's been pretty well documented by several thousand people. I can't imagine that anyone outside of the programming group that put that mess together would actually think it's a competent piece of software, and if they do, they must enjoy spending hours in front of their computer and not have much of a social life.) Second, some reviewers have disputed my claim that the unit cannot shuffle the entire HD. My claim is true, it has been substantiated by a senior marketing representative from Sony with whom I have exchanged several letters and phone calls. Yes, you can shuffle within albums (or "groups"), and you can shuffle within artists and playlists. But you CANNOT shuffle through the entire HD as a whole. The only way this would be possible would be to designate the entire library as a single playlist, and playlists are currently limited to 1000 tracks. So if you have 3,000 tracks on the player, there is absolutely, positively no way to shuffle those 3,000 tracks -- only subsets of those tracks (e.g., album, group, etc.) I suppose you could spend several extra hours of your life creating complicated playlists and shuffle between those playlists. But on an Ipod (and, incidentally, almost every other MP3 player on the market), you simply hit a menu entry titled "shuffle."

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Sony enters the crowded hard disk-based music player scene with a formidable contender, the NW-HD1. Billed as the world's smallest hard drive digital music player, the silver palm-sized unit is slim and sleek-- perfect for a pocket or purse. Weighing just under 3.9 ounces, the NW-HD1 is so light, you'll want to take it everywhere. Inside the unit, a 20 GB drive stores up to 13,000 Songs in ATRAC3plus format when the songs are encoded at the 48kbps bitrate setting. A lithium-ion battery delivers up to a whopping 30 hours of playtime-- most other digital music devices can't even come close in the battery life department.
The NW-HD1 keeps the music smooth and steady with a built in G-Sensor that ensures skip-free play during your bounciest car rides, workouts and jogging expeditions. The 1.5" 7-line backlit display provides all the information you need to keep tabs on your tunes. While displaying track number, bit rate, elapsed time, song title, and artist name, it provides a spectrum analyzer for viewing your music's highs and lows, as well as play mode, bass boost, volume limiter and battery life indicators.
In addition to a standard mini headphone jack, the NW-HD1 also sports a line out jack so you can plug the player into your car or home stereo, or into a powered speaker system. The unit's USB 2.0 port is the key transferring music onto the device and charging the battery. Simply pop the NW-HD1 into the supplied cradle, connect the cradle to your PC and you're ready to transfer your ATRAC3plus encoded tracks at high speed to the device. Meanwhile, the cradle charges the NW-HD1's battery when the cradle is plugged in via the supplied AC adapter. A quick charge feature allows the battery to be charged to 80 percent capacity in just an hour.
The power to encode, organize, and manage the music you play on the NW-HD1 lies in Sony's bundled music software, SonicStage. With SonicStage, you can import, manage and easily transfer your digital music collections. First, import your audio CDs, existing MP3s or Windows Media files into SonicStage and then encode them to ATRAC3plus. Then, set up playlists and mixes on your PC. Finally, use the high speed USB connection to upload the tracks to your NW-HD1. It couldn't be simpler. The NW-HD1 is also fully compatible with Sony's robust Connect Online Music Store, which provides an easy method for downloading personal music in ATRAC3plus format. Connect offers access to over 500,000 songs including many independent titles as well as featured artist and celebrity mixes.
What's in the Box HW-HD1 Network Walkman Digital Music Player, SonicStage software, earbud headphones, carrying pouch, USB cable, USB cradle, AC power adaptor

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