X-Series FAQ
Soozieq and I discussed about putting up a FAQ in this growing thread. It is rather raw at the moment, but hopefully this will help answer your questions.Q. Does the X-series support lossless playback?
A. The NWZ versions does not support compressed lossless codecs (flac, ape, wma lossless, atrac, alac). It does however support uncompressed Linear PCM (wav). The Japan-only NW versions does have support for Atrac Lossless.
Q. What audio codecs does it support?
A. MP3, WMA (incuding WMA10 DRM), AAC-LC, Linear PCM (in addition to HE-AAC and Atrac in the NW versions).
Q. Does it support VBR?
A. Yes, with all three lossy codecs.
Q. What bitrates does it support?
A. It supports 32 to 320kbps for MP3, 32 to 320kbps for WMA (despite the Sony literature) and 16 to 320kbps for AAC-LC files.
Q. Is the X-series compatible with Mac and/or Linux?
A. AFAIK, yes it does - though not officially. Linux users should be able to see it as a UMS device, or can use libmtp library. Mac OS X users has support by way of XNJB. (not verified)
Q. How do I transfer music onto the player?
A. The X-series support drag and drop out of the box provided you are running Windows XP SP2 or Windows Vista, without the need of installing any additional software. Just open Explorer and drop the files into the /MUSIC folder (up to 7 levels deep). You can also use Windows Media Player or freewares like MediaMonkey to transfer. iTunes is supported using Sony Content Transfer plug-in.
Edit: The NW (Japanese) version supports full drag and drop, including the transfer of Atrac files. And yes, full gapless support for Atrac. (thanks FenderP)
Q. What is the maximum resolution of supported videos?
A. Sony quotes a maximum video resolution support of QVGA (320x240) for AVC/h.264 and MPEG-4 video playback, and 480x270 for those encoded with Windows Media Video 9 (simple profile).
Q. What is the resolution of the screen?
A. 240x432 WQVGA with 262k colour support
Q. What is OLED? What are the advantages and disadvantages?
A. OLED is short for Organic Light Emitting Diode. The individual pixels gives off light when electrical current flows through the panel. This negates the need of bulky and power hungry backlight resulting in a more power efficient screen and an overall thinner profile. They also have a faster response time than a standard LCD screen, has superb viewing angle and higher contrast (black is true black). Typically, the biggest disadvantage of OLED is the limited lifetime of the organic materials. New blue OLEDs for example has a lifetime of 62,000 hours, which isn't a problem in a product like this.
Q. Is there an accelerometer in the X-series?
A. No. It does auto-landscape in certain applications (pictures, movies), but it won't detect any physical movement.
Q. How's the battery life?
A. With ANC and WLAN disabled, brightness set to medium, and all audio enchancements turned off, approx 33 hours for 128kbps MP3, 31 hours for 128kbps WMA, 29 hours for 128kbps AAC and 31 hours for Linear PCM playback. Audio playback of higher bitrate files will require more power. WiFi usage is estimated at around 5 hours.
Q. What is the true user available capacity?
A.
NWZ-X1050: 15,777,629,312 bytes
NWZ-X1060: 31,871,533,056 bytes
NWZ-X1051: 15,254,618,112 bytes
NWZ-X1061: 31,350,390,784 bytes
Q. Is Slacker available in none-US models?
A. No. Due to copyright laws, the Slacker service is only available if you purchase the NWZ-X1051 and NWZ-X1061 versions.
Q. What about accessories?
A. Soozieq said it best when it comes to Sony's attitude towards making available accessories for their own products: "LOL!! Accessories? What accessories????"
Q. How do you get album art to show??
A. First, make sure the album art is embedded within the ID3 tag of your files. Second, the the album art has to be in JPEG file format and has to be saved in Baseline (Standard), not Baseline Optimized or Progressive. (thanks Soozieq)
Q. How does it sound?
A. Awesome.
I hope to expand the FAQ further. Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated.
