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My New Sony NW-A55 Walkman

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Re: My New Sony NW-A55 Walkman

#221

Post by eropple »

jacquesm wrote: post #201
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 se…

> Try switching off a modern TV, it requires three or four steps in sequence or you can start all over again.

They do? My LG has a power button and it turns off when I press it. So does the TCL in my studio.

Re: My New Sony NW-A55 Walkman

#222

Post by cropcirclbureau »

Toreno96 wrote: post #217
cropcirclbureau wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 artist…

> you can only have playlist of songs. There's no way to collapse songs of a single album to one entry. You could add the whole albums to the playlist, one by one, and then play the playlist w/ shuffle disabled. This last bit makes it a limited workaround, however. On the other hand, Spotify API could allow to implement the custom solution to shuffle these, similar to https://spotifyshuffler.com/ , if you have enough…

I'm not using the playlists as a list of songs to listen to in one session. These are issues that come to the fore when you start using them as an organizational primitive. It's more limited than you think in that sense. For example, let's say I have a 20 album playlist. A very usual affair for me as I compile a single playlist for one month or a season. 20 albums comes around at 200 files. That's an ungodly amount of scrolling right there. (my seasonal/monthly actually average around 50 albums). Now imagine how painful it'd be for my long running playlists with hundreds or even that one playlist of mine with thousands of albums?

One workaround that I and other users make use of is to just add the first track of albums as links to the albums themselves. It's whatever. It's a bit stupid this is something I have to fucking deal with in the biggest music interface that the planet makes use of. Anyways, I mainly mentioned that as example of the ethos of Spotify UI/UX and what kinds of user they're primarily catering to. I guess I'm in the excluded group in this implementation of "worse-is-better" or something. (Is there a term for that group? Power user can't cover it because people with disabilities are usually in it.)

Re: My New Sony NW-A55 Walkman

#223

Post by lxgr »

mellavora wrote: post #166
fbnlsr wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Spotify has two drawbacks though: you need a constant Internet connection and it removes tracks at will. The constant internet connection can…

> The constant internet connection can be solved by downloading media to the device, Well, you'd think so, but I've had albums which I had downloaded disappear if I hadn't listened to them for a while. So the "download" isn't really stable.

There is a maximum of five offline devices per account which used to be enforced manually (i.e. you had to make a conscious choice of which device to kick out if you wanted to add a new one), but it's now managed automatically on a least-recently-used basis. Maybe this is what you're running into?

Re: My New Sony NW-A55 Walkman

#224

Post by johnvaluk »

Jiejeing wrote: post #209
dsr_ wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For anyone affected by this, a simple trick to reviving a Sansa Clip+ that won't turn on is to hold the power and home button simultaneously for about 20-30 seconds. Let go and press the power button and it might turn on.

I'm not sure what causes these players to become unresponsive. It's happened to me when it tries to play an unusual file or after I've transferred music to the device and left it plugged into the computer for a while.

They are still my favorite standalone portable mp3 player, even with the stock firmware.

Re: My New Sony NW-A55 Walkman

#225

Post by criddell »

jstummbillig wrote: post #192
bartread wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> MP3 player UX has ever been comparable to what Spotify offers nowadays. You might have different experiences to me. My iPod was never a distraction whilst driving in the way that Spotify, with it's manifold failure modes and inconsistent/unresponsive UX, can be. With depressing regularity I drive without either music or podcasts because that's preferable to dying (or killing someone else) in a car crash because I'm…

> You might have different experiences to me. Definitely. Your experience does sound demoralizing. I am not sure I have had Spotify crash on me thus far and certainly not with any regularity. I think it's safe to assume that you have an untypically bad experience, because if what you described was true for most people, Spotify would have no users. Which begs the question, why do you stick to it? There are competing s…

Spotify crashes on me quite a bit too but I stick with it because my kids like Spotify and we have a family subscription which is a pretty good deal. I really dislike the Spotify UI, especially the way podcasts are given so much screen space and it's something I have no interest in and can't figure out how to disable it.

I had free Apple Music for six months and I think it actually sounds better than Spotify (or at least I preferred it, I absolutely do not have audiophile ears) but I don't want to pay for a third music service (we also have Pandora because their radio stations are great) and my kids prefer Spotify.

Re: My New Sony NW-A55 Walkman

#227

Post by rchaud »

dmitriid wrote: post #140
fbnlsr wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Spotify has two drawbacks though: you need a constant Internet connection and it removes tracks at will. The constant internet connection can…

> but the fact that some tracks (even whole albums) can become unavailable suddenly is utterly disappointing. Blame the copyright holders aka the Big Four/Big Five: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_industry Streaming services would gladly stream anything you want to you.

Nah, I'll just blame Spotify.

There are services that let you download to your local storage, whatever you buy from them. Bandcamp is the obvious example, but in the past there was eMusic and even iTunes. Spotify could do it, but they just don't want to. How else are they going to help themselves to your wallet every month?

Sure streaming services want to give me anything I desire...anyhting except allow me to download an audio file that I can keep on my system. Then I wouldn't have to give a crap about whether Spotify still had the rights to it.

Re: My New Sony NW-A55 Walkman

#228

Post by kkkgllloo »

eropple wrote: post #221
jacquesm wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 se…

> Try switching off a modern TV, it requires three or four steps in sequence or you can start all over again. They do? My LG has a power button and it turns off when I press it. So does the TCL in my studio.

The Samsung TV in this Airbnb goes into standby when you press the "power" button. To actually turn it off you have to go into the settings and find the real option, or unplug it.

Re: My New Sony NW-A55 Walkman

#229

Post by rchaud »

hnlmorg wrote: post #179
izacus wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't remember any of the MP3 players desperately trying to shove podcast down my throat instead of showing my music. They also never lost all my downloaded music in the first 30 minutes of an 11 hour flight due to a crash bug. So just in those simple ways Spotify is worse.

I've encountered plenty of bugs with portable music players. I've had CD walkman scratch disks, cassette players eat tapes and I've had SD and compact flash storage fail on me too. No technology is beyond failure.

A CD getting scratched isn't really a bug, it's a limitation of that technology and form factor. Is there anybody on earth that didn't scratch up at least a few accidentally?

Re: My New Sony NW-A55 Walkman

#230

Post by aceazzameen »

marlor wrote: post #37
pcmoney wrote: post #7

Somebody help me understand this? If the audio quality isn’t better why is it so much better than the “bad” subscription services? I understand critiques of how little they pay artists but I mean from a customer perspective, why is spotify et al bad? I assume you have to buy download organize and sync the music for this system? Is it just nostalgia? Just a single purpose device that cant text you etc?

I have both a Walkman (for music) and an upgraded/rebuilt iPod (for audiobooks) and prefer them for a few reasons: - They don’t use any mobile data, and work when in a mobile-phone black spot (e.g. the national parks I go to most weekends). This is the main one. - I can store all my music on there, without needing to use any storage space on my phone. - They last forever with some basic maintenance. My iPod was made…

I think you're selling me on upgrading my 4th gen iPod. I didn't realize you can swap out the HDD for a SD card. It looks pretty easy too! Also all this talk about Rockbox makes me want to try it.
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