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My New Sony NW-A55 Walkman

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Re: My New Sony NW-A55 Walkman

#201

Post by jacquesm »

zasdffaa wrote: post #116

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…

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.

Re: My New Sony NW-A55 Walkman

#202

Post by otikik »

> you mount the Walkman as a USB storage device and transfer files. Wait… that’s it? Yes!

Ahh yes that is a Premium feature not even Apple or Android flagship phones are able to provide. For some reason.

Re: My New Sony NW-A55 Walkman

#203

Post by Pawka »

amelius wrote: post #122
SECProto wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. I am definitely wouldnt call myself an audiophile, but I like my over ear headphones. I switch them easily between my desktop, my laptop, and my cell phone. They never die. Then I take my phone to my ten year old car and plug an aux cable in (it has Bluetooth but it is garbage - slow to connect, bad quality for music (regular skipping etc). Then when I travel to family's houses and want to play something over th…

There are still times when you want Bluetooth. For example when you want to pair with someone else's Bluetooth speaker at a party.

There is also value of 3.5mm input on the speaker - it reduces battery drain a lot (useful when camping for example, mine lasted longer almost 50%). All three BT speakers I was able to find in my flat (different brands) have the line-in connector. Checked just now because I was curious.

Re: My New Sony NW-A55 Walkman

#204

Post by Jaruzel »

ploika wrote: post #198
Stormwalker wrote: post #194

This is cool, but how do you obtain music as files legally? The only platform that allows that is Bandcamp, but if artist is not presented here, torrents is your only option I can think of.

You can (almost) always buy CDs and rip them. I'd be mildly surprised if an artist was selling music without either a presence on Bandcamp or a store on their own website that you could download from. I'm certain I've bought a handful of albums from Amazon and Google over the years that I've put onto various phones and MP3 players. Is that not possible anymore?

Amazon still let you download DRM free MP3s for any music you've bought (well, as a Prime customer I still can, maybe it's different for non-Prime).

I still buy CDs. That way the music is mine, and no-one can suddenly delete the CD from my bookshelf without my consent. I rip the CDs lossless, then de-jewel-case the CD and put the disc and inlay into an acid-neutral storage bag, and seal it. I can't do hi-bitrate music like this (unless I want to rip BluRay albums) but at my age, it's not like I still have a high-fidelity hearing ability anyway.

Re: My New Sony NW-A55 Walkman

#205

Post by cropcirclbureau »

jstummbillig wrote: post #160
atoav wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 experien…

> Worse, for which usecase? For most use cases. > I as a musician like to listen to full albums [...] How does Spotify prohibits you as a musician from listening to an album or reading up on music or looking at music from eras? I detect nothing in any of these tasks that Spotify would make harder than any of the alternativ ways I know of. If anything it should be easier, considering the considerable amount of meta in…

Here's one reason: you can only have playlist of songs. There's no way to collapse songs of a single album to one entry. You might think it's a little change but it completely devastates the experience if you're someone who listens to whole albums.

That's not the only UX hurdle if you're someone who curates a library of things to listen to instead of engorging from an algorithm. Sure, you can follow albums and artists but since you can't organize them, these features gets useless if you have anything more than 100 items. The UI is in general is way too simple, with very sparse information density compared to your traditional music player. Was it because of necessity or style that all these previous tools opted for all these features Spotify shirks? I'll let you decide that.

Re: My New Sony NW-A55 Walkman

#206

Post by INTPenis »

roboyoshi wrote: post #176
INTPenis wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you tell me if the Hiby has a sleep feature? I'm looking at the store[1] but can't see it listed as a feature. 1. https://store.hiby.com/products/hiby-r3-pro-saber

I had one for a week and returned it. IIRC there was no sleep/standby feature. You either lock it like an iphone screen or turn it off. But it starts pretty quickly when you turn it off, so that's not the problem. For me it was just too slow and instable. There is a github repo with all the issues ( https://github.com/vext01/hiby-issues ) - check that before you buy one.

When I say sleep I mean that you listen until a timer runs out and it pauses whatever you're listening to automatically.

Re: My New Sony NW-A55 Walkman

#207

Post by NikolaNovak »

astrange wrote: post #141
jazzyjackson wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of nice headphones with low impedance among grado, sennheiser, beyerdynamic etc, you kinda have to go out of your way to choose a high impedance “home stereo” style ‘phone

That’s funny since when I ordered a Beyerdynamic headphone on Amazon they sent me the high impedance model I hadn’t asked for. Although the best one I own is a Stax which needs an entire speaker amp.

Wait, aren't Stax the electrostatic high-voltage headphones? I think at that point, "Convenience" is deeply crossed out as a selection criteria, and a portable phone while jogging is not a likely scenario :).

Re: My New Sony NW-A55 Walkman

#208

Post by locofocos »

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.

Re: My New Sony NW-A55 Walkman

#209

Post by Jiejeing »

dsr_ wrote: post #173
gspr wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 Sansa Clip+s with Rockbox is the perfect solution. I went through three before being unable to pick up any more without paying triple price. Why do great products disappear?!

Why are yours dying so fast? (Alternatively, why do mine hold up so well?) I have had two Clip+ in the last 15 years. I retired the first one because I broke the clip off; it still works otherwise. I was using them about 2 hours a day until the pandemic.

I have had several clip+ses over the year, and the one thing that died every time was the onboard flash (which prevents the player from booting at all). I resurrected my last one where it was only corrupted and not dead, but I did not have other issues otherwise.

Now I am using an hiby R3, which is quite clunkier, but allows me to choose between microsd storage and streaming from the phone in high quality, while also having 2.5mm balanced IEMs (kind of a gimmick, but I like their sound a lot).

edit: and of course being able to finally ditch USB-mini is great.

Re: My New Sony NW-A55 Walkman

#210

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

kinleyd wrote: post #117
t0mas88 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool to hear Rockbox still alive! I wrote the original graphical UI code for the playing screens many many years ago. Back in the iRiver H120 times.

Rockbox was very cool. I used it for many years.

is, not was.
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