My New Sony NW-A55 Walkman

I have all my music stored locally. It's about 300 CDs that i ripped (out of a 1000 CD collection) and stored the originals in the attic. Since iTunes removed their DRM, i've purchased my music there. My iPhone is "plenty" good for playing music where i want it, and with an iTunes match subscription, i have my music available in the cloud.

I don't subscribe to any music streaming service, and i doubt i ever will, especially since "modern music" seems to be about cranking out one hit wonders with very little quality and skill.

It may be survival bias, but i am hard pressed to find any band/musician from the past 2 decades we will still listen to in 2 decades time.

> 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.

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.

My biggest pet peeve is that very much all streaming applications have very tiny progress bars, it's almost impossible to navigate through longer piece of music or podcast precisely. It's like all the functions to navigate around the music have become an afterthought and they focus on showing artwork and other bells and whistles over utility.

As if people making these apps don't actually use them.

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.