I received the NW-A35 on 23 December and have been testing for over a week with a small number of sample albums and playlists from my 21,000+ track digital music library, stored on a Synology NAS drive, and accessed via a Windows 10 laptop. I bought the NW-A35 with a 200GB MicroSD card to replace my old broken iPod Classic.
I have very conflicted feelings about this device, as I love the look, size, weight, sound and feel of it, and it has a lovely clear display, but there are four BIG, fundamental "howevers" making me consider getting a refund (dependent on the feedback I receive from Sony on whether there are, or they are working on fixes):
1. Around 50% of my album art didn't appear on the player, but appears on every other digital music device I've used (iPod, Logitech Media Server, Samsung Galaxy A3). Some heavy Googling determined this is because they were "progressive" jpgs, and the player can only read/display "baseline" encoded jpgs. Several hours of testing and research online led me to using the free IrfanView image editing software to losslessly convert these jpgs into baseline within the folder structure the media library and cover art images sit in. I'm now having to spend two days using the excellent Bliss software to un-embed album art from all my digital library tracks, then re-embed my entire library all over again in order to "refresh" the images that have changed to baseline so that they will (hopefully) all appear in the Sony player. Several days of faffing over the Christmas period just to deal with this issue - why can't Sony upgrade the firmware to make it read (the very common) progressive JPG format? This is a problem I'd imagine the casual user wouldn't have the time, knowledge or inclination to investigate and resolve, and Sony really do need to address this urgently, as they also need to with the next one to make it a true iPod alternative...
2. Gapless playback doesn't appear to work - to stop those extremely irritating momentary silent gaps that stick out like a sore thumb when listening to albums containing continuous music across multiple tracks (such as live albums, mix CDs and many "concept" type albums [remember 'War of the Worlds'?]). Almost all of the music I have transferred to the device is transcoded (converted) to 192kbps m4a format (i.e. dithered down to a lower sound, to fit all my 21,000 tracks on the device). Any albums containing continuous music have an audible glitch a split second into each track after its transition from the previous – so it's not true "gapless" audio. This is another fundamental flaw in this device, as it is aimed at people with large music collections that used to own iPod Classics. Such users will invariably own several albums where true gapless playback is required to enjoy their albums as they originally sounded. I'm interested to know if Sony plan to fix this, or if they know of a workaround (such as transcoding into a different, but equivalent format when transferring music to the device).
3. Sony's Media Go and (more recent) Music Center software are both dreadful, slow and not fit for purpose – Instead, I have imported my old iTunes library into MediaMonkey, which I now use to synchronise my music and playlists with the Sony player. Sony should ditch both pieces of software, and focus on making devices syncable with as many established pieces of music software as possible – and fixing the album art and true gapless issues that other portable media players do with ease.
4. Some mp3 files won't transfer to the device or appear in playlists. MediaMonkey throws up an error that some (but not all) of my mp3 files aren't in a format compatible with the device. However, if I drag and drop these mp3 files into the device's 'MUSIC' folder, I can play them directly from the device – so they clearly are compatible. The particular mp3s are all long ones (between 00h 59m and 3hrs in length) and were all created in Sony Sound Forge some time ago. Not sure why these are considered incompatible, as they play on all my other devices and are a standard mp3 format (128kbps CBR, 44.1kHz, 16 bit). Nothing I've found online can tell me why these won't synchronise with the device or appear in playlists.
So, in summary, I'm unsure about whether I should keep or return this item. I really wanted to keep it as a long-tern replacement for my iPod Classic, but it is a player with complications, that lacks the intuitive, ease of use the iPod had. I will hopefully finish replacing my progressive jpg album covers with baseline versions, then will test the player a bit further. If I'm still unable to see all my cover art, and if Sony don't have immediate plans to update the firmware to enable true gapless playback across all audio formats, I'm very likely to return this for a refund, and wait until the true iPod replacement materialises.
