Talk:SonicStage

Encyclopedia article or review?

This article reads like a (quite harsh) magazine review of the software, and it definitely is not NPOV.

I'll sit down with my Vaio notebook this weekend and explore SonicStage to get a better feel for the program and see if this can be cleaned up. LarryMac 19:11, 25 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

What a biased article

this software is the worst program ever, it wasn't even created by sony, it was created by a company called sonic. the software is unbelievably terrible, from messing your mp3's to very high cpu usage.

Alternatives for Sonicstage

I shurly hope there will be more alternatives soon for this crappy software. Sony released a somewhat better tool: MP3 File Manager Version 2.0 for Network Walkman This software is 'installed' on the device itself and lets you update the carried music library from more than one computer, something that is forbidden with the Sonicstage software. ( unless re-initializing the device every time you use a new Sonicstage installation is an option for you ) The tool lacks a lot of features, but being a winamp user, I do not care.

I would like to ask the open source programmers to see if the device format can be de-coded and recoded in f.i. winamp modules.

Marcel Heijkoop

Pathetic Sonicstage

Although this artical reads like a harsh review, it is actually very accurate. The inability of the software to encode in mp3 format means that many sensible users (anticipating future non-sony products) will want to encode using itunes or WMP, and then import their library into the Sonicstage software to transfer the music to their sony device. Otherwise they will have to encode in proprietary ATRAC format, which is not supported by the majority of products.

However, Sonicstage has a critical flaw which makes it unable to properly fulfill the role of a even a simple shell product which imports the list of mp3s on your computer and transfers desired songs to your device: when importing songs, the software assumes that songs with the *same* album title but different artists are indeed different albums. So if artist X collaborates with Y on a song, the songs will appear as different albums. And you must manually tell sonic stage, track by track (!!) that each song is in fact part of the same album. And of course, the order of songs is jumbled and must next be corrected.

A woefully inadequate and poorly executed product! If I had known, I would have voted with my pocketbook by refusing to buy a Sony network walkman.