I'm a sucker for punishment, so I'm giving this a crack with my UK NW-HD3. First thing it says is something about the albums being sorted by artist now, which is different to 2.3 It also says that previous versions will be unstalled for you, so you can just go ahead and run it, your library won't be erased.
Start it up and it contacts the server, downloads the OpenMG Secure Module (9Mb) the SonicStage main file (9Mb), SonicStage add ons (1.5Mb) and the driver. About a 20 Meg download in all for you modem'ers! If you don't have previous versions installed, it'll be more, as when I reran the setup and chose to reinstall everything it started to download DirectX9 and a bunch of other things.
Anyway, away it goes and uninstalls the previous version before putting on the new version. Restart on completion, and as your PC starts up Sonicstage kicks in saying it's converting its database - Takes a few minutes.
In the program files group we have:
Sonicstage
SonicStage Backup Tool
Sonicstage File Conversion Tool
Sonic Stage Help
A couple of webpages to Sony support
There are some minor changes in terminology:
My Compilation Album is now 'Playlist'
Use of 'Favorite Playlist' has been eliminated (You can create a custom playlist according to your preferences and is called a 'playlist')
Source is now 'Album name'
Album Revisions: Some shennigans going on with the album sorting, if you've got incomplete or different album tags on some tracks in the same album, it will sort them by Album name putting them in seperate folders but create playlists to link the tracks together.
On start up it runs through a quick setup asking if you want to import files etc etc.
Into the main program, similar look to 2.3, and has four different skins you can choose from. The main page is now the Connect Music Store, so internet connection certainly helps. And yes, its the US site, you apparently can't change to the UK site. The three main options on SonicStage are Music Source, My Library and Transfer ala v2.3.
Music Source has Connect Music Store, Import a CD, and Import music files as options. The rest seems the same.
My Library seems similar too, but you'll notice the blue icons for albums, and red icons for playlists on there.
Creating a new playlist, you can just drag n drop from the Library window on top of the New Playlist listing and it'll add it.
The interface does seem a bit snappier, but you still can't select more then one folder at a time to import, like you can do with nearly every Windows application. Hello Sony! Have you guys heard of sticking to standards? Very annoying.
Try to transfer to my HD3 and it says - Now get this - The connected ATRAC Audio Device must be initialized to be used with the currently installed SonicStage.
Oh boy! I have to format my HD3? I think I'll leave it there thank you very much!