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General discussion

Aony NWZ-A729: missing features

Aug 12, 2009 2:52AM PDT

My Sony NWZ-A729 has great sound, but it lacks some features.
Do the newer Sony players have any of these features that the A729
lacks?
1. Display of time remaining on a track
2. Ability to fast forward within a track
3. Ability to delete a track (or flag a track for delete) as it is
playing. With the A729, you have to be connected to a PC to delete
4. Ability to assign a Windows drive letter to the player's drive
so that one can use command line tools to view and manipulate
files on the player - or at least some way to copy a directory
listing of the player's drive to a file, so one can record what's
on the player

Discussion is locked

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Regarding "missing features"
Aug 15, 2009 2:37AM PDT

1. The latest X-series still only counts up the time per track, but as a compromise it also displays the time length of the song being played. Guess Sony was too lazy (or cheap...or didn't think it was a problem) to rewrite their firmware to add the display option of counting down the song play time.

2. You should already have this on your player. Your A729 is quite similar to my A829; on my player, I just hold down on the skip forward side (right) of the main square control to get the FF function. Doing the same on the left side gets the rewind function.

3. Still a no-go on my X-series. I don't know how many manufacturers include a delete function on their current lineup of devices (not Sony, not Apple, and I believe not Microsoft), but the only device I currently own that has this is my Zen X-Fi.

4. You should be able to do this with your A729. Depending on which version of Windows you're using (as I just bought a new name-brand computer I'm still learning where everything is in Vista; my main music/media/DAP manager 'puter is an XP Pro box), you can redesignate how Windows will see your A729, either as a media transfer protocol MTP device (default) or mass-storage UMS/MSC device ("drive"). In XP, connect your A729 and go to My Computer> Properties> Hardware Tab> Device Manager. Select your Walkman and go through the options to make the switch...simple as that. If your running Vista, I suspect it's probably just as simple, but since I've got less that a couple of hours running this new Dell (and most of that was Windows Update patching the OS and Office), I haven't spent any time looking around at how the OS and its functions are organized.

Once done, your A729 should now show up in Windows File Explorer (or any other file manager) with a drive letter assigned to it. Reversing the process is just as easy, only now you'll have to select the correct UMS device/drive instead. I did this with my new X-series, and in generally it works well though it's still not all that fast in terms of file transfers (flash-based devices are just that way, I guess). You should probably back up any content you don't want to lose on your A729 just in case before doing this, but when I did the switch on my player I believe it didn't even impact any of the songs that I'd already loaded on it when it was still in its MTP configuration (no guarantees, though...in my case I only had a couple of dozen or so songs loaded and I didn't care if they were affected by the changeover).

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Getting Windows XP to assign a drive letter to a Sony A729
Aug 20, 2009 1:08AM PDT

Thanks for the response.
When I go to Device Manager
(I'm on XP-Pro SP3) and view the dialog
for the Sony player, I can view lots of information,
but the only thing I can change is the driver.

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My bad...
Aug 26, 2009 5:54PM PDT

You're in the right place, but I left out a bunch of info...

a. Select the Driver tab and hit the Update Driver button. You should get a installation wizard popup window.

b. Select "No, not at this time" to the question and hit the Next button.

c. On the next screen select "Install from a list or specific location (Advanced)" and hit Next.

d. On the subsequent screen select "Don't search. I will choose the driver to install" and hit Next.

e. Once you've made sure that you want to complete this, on the next screen select/highlight "USB Mass Storage Device" from the list and hit Next. If I remember right, this should finalize the switchover.

WARNING: it may be a bit more complicated switching BACK to the MTP device classification should you ever want to do it (why, I'm not sure...unless perhaps it's to use the Walkman device management software sourced from Sony). I've never tried reversing the process (basically because I don't have or see a need to), but I have discovered that when I look at my now UMS X-series Walkman in Device Manager (it no longer shows up as a 'Portable Device' but as a 'Storage Volume'), Windows no longer shows the MTP option on the list I described in item E above. I suspect that you'd need to have a CD or download file with the proper MTP driver.