[cagas]

I think LDAC would still be the winner (on paper specs) in audio quality vs APT-X HD, assuming you have sony LDAC headphones. Saying that,i have the WH-H900N which supports both LDAC and APT-X HD, not really sure if i can tell the difference though... hahaha!

 

[haveblue]

My NW-A45 from accessoryjack arrived today. Sound quality is pretty good, it was about time to replace my old beat up Cowon J3.

So my question to those with the A35, what's the battery life in this thing when not playing any files? I couldn't find a quick-start sleep mode like the J3 had, so I assume the substitute is to just pause it and hit the power button instead of doing a full shut down, since the restart takes too long?

Also, some of my album art isn't displaying. My tag data and file naming amongst my mp3 and flac files are 100% consistent so there shouldn't be any disparity in tag info. All cover art is in jpeg format and <1MB, shown through mp3tag.

After dragging and dropping folders into my new NW-A45 through Windows Explorer, certain album would not display album art. There is no correlation in image size, both 400x400 and 1000x1000 images would fail to show up. If I delete the files and re-upload them, some albums would be fixed while others would go bad. This happens for both the files on the main device and on the SD card.

I read that adding files to the player through Media Go would help. It still does not, and the same album art would be missing on Media Go as well. Any ideas? I'm thinking the firmware for both the player and Media Go are just missing a particular tag requirement. No issue with album art with Cowon/Foobar/Plex/KMPlayer.

 

[ricealter]

Just did a battery life test with my A45. It was fully discharged (keep playing till it powers off) and fully charged till the red led turns off. The battery lasted for 45 hrs of continuous playback.
Volume is set to 6/120, loud enough for my Denon C820. All songs are stored on 200gb sd and most are 16/44.1 flac, about 1/6 are hi-res (mixed with 24/48, 24/96 and DSD64).

 

[Krutsch]

My NW-A45 from accessoryjack arrived today.
...

Also, some of my album art isn't displaying. My tag data and file naming amongst my mp3 and flac files are 100% consistent so there shouldn't be any disparity in tag info. All cover art is in jpeg format and <1MB, shown through mp3tag.

After dragging and dropping folders into my new NW-A45 through Windows Explorer, certain album would not display album art. There is no correlation in image size, both 400x400 and 1000x1000 images would fail to show up. If I delete the files and re-upload them, some albums would be fixed while others would go bad. This happens for both the files on the main device and on the SD card.
...

Sony Walkmans insist that your JPEG album art be saved with "Baseline" and not "Progressive" compression. That was my issue and I had to re-embeed my artwork after re-saving as Baseline.

 

[haveblue]

Sony Walkmans insist that your JPEG album art be saved with "Baseline" and not "Progressive" compression. That was my issue and I had to re-embeed my artwork after re-saving as Baseline.

Well that sounds like a pain. How did you do it? Any program that can do it as a batch action instead of having to manually extract with mp3tag, resave with photoshop, then re-embed with mp3tag for each album?

I don't just want to replace everything with "get album artwork" since I find that often returns low res files, badly colored files, or it does not find anything with some obscure albums.

 

[Krutsch]

Well that sounds like a pain. How did you do it? Any program that can do it as a batch action instead of having to manually extract with mp3tag, resave with photoshop, then re-embed with mp3tag for each album?

It *was* a pain. I did mine with Photoshop. Hopefully someone has a recommendation for software that will do this in batch mode.

 

[haveblue]

Sony Walkmans insist that your JPEG album art be saved with "Baseline" and not "Progressive" compression. That was my issue and I had to re-embeed my artwork after re-saving as Baseline. It *was* a pain. I did mine with Photoshop. Hopefully someone has a recommendation for software that will do this in batch mode.

Edit: Or just use TagScanner which will both recompress and resize your album art.

I found a solution!

I used mp3tag v2.85 and IrfanView v4.50 to batch convert all my embedded album art into "baseline" compression jpegs, whether they initially were or not. Photoshop has a batch image processor but it doesn't have the option to overwrite files in subfolders so it won't work here. This does take a good amount of processing time but at least you don't have to convert the images manually.

1) Perform step 2 from this link to extract the existing album art with mp3tag. This will generate an image file for each track in each album folder. You can skip step 3 because you'll be given the option to delete the existing cover when running step 4.

2) Run IrfanView to re-save all those extracted images using the instructions here. I saved them all as 600x600 jpg quality 90/100, overwriting the original files. These two steps took about 10 minutes on my 327GB 13,700-file library.

3) Perform step 4 from the original link to re-embed your audio files with the updated images. This took a while - three and a half hours for me on a 4670k and a 5400rpm desktop hard drive. If the song title has a question mark or space at the end of it, the tagging will fail, so you'll have to manually alter those afterwards.

4) Finally, do a windows search on "jpg" in your main root folder to select all the image files to delete them and clean up your folders.

This had the added benefit of making my album art consistently sized. Unfortunately now it's one extra step I'll need to do for cleaning up metafiles upon obtaining new music, just to ensure my Walkman can show cover art.

Gonna add some keywords in case anyone does a search on this. Looks like it's a pretty common complaint on the Sony tech support forum. Sony Walkman A30 A35 A40 A45 missing not showing album cover art baseline progressive jpeg.

 

[uncletim]

too bad about the album art. I am interested in the A45 dap. will hear when i return to Asia.

my files tagged with several apps, TagScanner and Mp3tag mostly.

I want to try out wireless. since the update to AptX HD, does it still support vanilla AptX? I think it needs to be the same on both ends?

would be nice if they fixed the album art thing.

 

[haveblue]

I want to try out wireless. since the update to AptX HD, does it still support vanilla AptX? I think it needs to be the same on both ends?

would be nice if they fixed the album art thing.

I haven't had the ability to try it, but vanilla AptX is in the options along with AptX HD. Yeah people seem to have been complaining about this on Walkmans for years, so I don't know how eager they are to fix it. I guess all the artwork you get through Sony's Media Go are "baseline".

It sounds good though, I really like the "Studio" VPT surround sound setting.

 

[uncletim]

Thanks for checking on the dual-AptX mode.

I got an email back from the author of TagScanner and he says with the option in Edit mode: Keep ---> Recompress, art would all be saved to "Basic" not progressive. might be a bit of a language barrier. I have no way to try it since I do not have the A45 DAP yet.

https://www.xdlab.ru/en/

 

[haveblue]

I got an email back from the author of TagScanner and he says with the option in Edit mode: Keep ---> Recompress, art would all be saved to "Basic" not progressive. might be a bit of a language barrier. I have no way to try it since I do not have the A45 DAP yet.

Yup, TagScanner works. Saved a cover as progressive, then ran it through TagScanner and it shows up in the Walkman just fine. Just make sure to go in program options and set the recompression quality anywhere from 90 to 100. This program does everything mp3tag does in addition to recompressing the album art so it looks like I'll keep this one.

The A45 sounds quite good though in my opinion. Does the ZX300 offer anything extra other than a balanced out, higher power output, and a nicer case? Can't find chip info on either of them.

 

[Raketen]

Yup, TagScanner works. Saved a cover as progressive, then ran it through TagScanner and it shows up in the Walkman just fine. Just make sure to go in program options and set the recompression quality anywhere from 90 to 100. This program does everything mp3tag does in addition to recompressing the album art so it looks like I'll keep this one.

The A45 sounds quite good though in my opinion. Does the ZX300 offer anything extra other than a balanced out, higher power output, and a nicer case? Can't find chip info on either of them.

They both use S-Master HX, Sony's integrated dac/class d amp thing (maybe also handles DSP?).

 

[goody]

The A45 is a great rich sounding definitely a step up in sound quality from my previous A17 ..the mids and bass are not as great on my ZX100 ..but its the UI that i really like so its my DAP of choice for now ...the sound reminds me of my Sony x1060 walkman

 

[uncletim]

I sent some dough to tagscanner author. Why not. I also sent some to BRAC to help Rohingya.

 

[foreverbelmont]

If you just have few songs that need to change the cover, just grab cover from amazon and it´s work for me at least.

But for ALAC file with cover, walkman still can´t show the cover. I have a ZX1 before and it has also the same problem with original sony app. You need to convert ALAC to FLAC or etc to let walkman show the cover.