Good mp3 player but a shame the software is so terrible! (Sony Walkman NW-HD3 20 GB)

Member Name: Trev11

Product:	Sony Walkman NW-HD3 20 GB
Date:	27/06/09 (45 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good music quality, very durable

Disadvantages: Sonicstage software is really terrible

I originally bought this mp3 player in preference to an iPod because of the reasonable price given that it has a 20GB hard drive and the fact that you are supposed to be able to drop it from 1m without damaging it. This was of particular interest to me because I was planning on using the mp3 player whilst snowboarding and wanted it to be able to withstand small impacts if necessary.

It has definitely lived up to its claim of being durable as I have been using it for 4 years now and it is still working as well as when I first bought it. Having a 20GB hard drive allowed me to transfer all of my music onto it which was very useful when I spent a year travelling around the world.

The sound quality is good and it is relatively easy to use but the biggest problem with it is the really terrible Sonicstage software you have to use to transfer music to and from the player. I originally had version 2.3 of the software but updated the software on my current laptop to versions 3.4 and then 4.3 a few months ago. When I plugged my mp3 player in and tried to use the updated Sonicstage software I ended up with a message telling me I could not transfer my music back to my laptop and that I would have to reformat my mp3 player before being able to add any new music! This would mean losing all my music on the player and not being able to recover some of it because I had used a few different computers in the past to transfer music across! I had also converted some of my music from CDs to Sony's ATRAC format which is supposed to result in better compression but there seems to be no easy way of converting the files from ATRAC to mp3 or other formats to play elsewhere which is very frustrating.

The other problem with the software is that it is not easy to set up playlists. This is a pretty standard feature on iPods so it is disappointing that this is so difficult to achieve on this player. Another thing that is less important but also annoying is the fact that there is no direct USB connection possible. In order to connect to a computer you also have to plug the mp3 player into a mains socket.

I am still currently using this mp3 player but as I have to choose between either formatting the player and losing some of my music or not being able to add music to it, I will be looking at buying a new mp3 player and definitely a different brand, probably an iPod Nano due to the really small size.

It may be possible to buy this player cheaply now but the software really is so bad that I have to recommend not buying it.

Summary: Has some good features but the terrible software causes a lot of problems.

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