Originally Posted by calvin91
any of you canadians looked in a sony store recently?? do they have them in stock? and do they have white? thx
I'm in the Montreal area & bought my NWZ-A829 almost 2 weeks ago at the Sony Style boutique in Laval. They only had 1 black in stock & another black in a showcase. Was looking for the 729 model (16GB without BlueTooth) but the store clerk told me it was not available in Canada (verified Sonystyle.ca & it confirms what I was told). You can only have the non-BT (716 4GB & 728 8GB) models in Canada at this point in time.
Having all my music compressed in WMA Lossles, I was looking for a 16GB model since WMA lossless uses up more space than MP3. After looking at different options (Creative, Samsung, Ipod, Cowon), I decided to bring my Sure SE-420 earphones to different stores in order to try different players. I found the Sony was leaps ahead of the competition in sound quality (at least to my taste). The #1 element I was looking for was sound quality, so the 829Walkman was an obvious choice for me, even if I don't need BT.
One big problem though: I was assured by the store clerk that I could use my WMA Lossless files on this and it turns out I cannot. You can only use WMA compressed at 192 kbps (the package & the website are unclear on this , only stating the Walkman is compatible with WMA). So this forces me into having to convert the albums I want to put on my Walkman back into WAV...or to sacrifice a bit of sound quality and convert them to MP3 320 kbps (CBR): big waste of time. I hope Sony realizes their mistake & gives us a firmware update to allow at least one format of Lossless compression to use on the Walkman (even if it was not WMA, I would happily convert to FLAC if Sony decided to support it).
The software included with the Walkman only supports conversions to MP3 256 kbps or WMA 192 kbps. On top of it, the software does not support video conversion unless you pay to upgrade it to the "pro" version. So I can say it is pretty much useless for me. I just drag & drop from Windows Explorer.
Still, if sound quality is the most important factor for you in the purchase of a DAP, I recommend the Walkman very strongly. I just love it!
P.S.: Can anyone recommend a good freeware to convert AVI or MPEG to MP4?