NW-A1000 symphonic
03/09/2013
I’ve been a Sony fanboy for quite some time, not about their games machines specifically, but their stylish hardware… I even once considered purchasing a set of overpriced Sony wine glasses, and one day my wife will give in and allow me to buy an Aibo 🙂
So today I was stoked to find my missing NWA-1000 data cables.
What I never liked about Sony’s equivalent to the iPod was the shitty resource heavy software, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SonicStage… but then I never liked iTunes, and resent having to support both my wife and colleagues at works iPhones 😉
So much to my delight there’s a fantastic piece of open source software available: Symphonic
Description
Sony's Network Walkmans released before mid 2007 need SonicStage to transfer music (as iPods need iTunes). But SonicStage is only available on Windows.
JSymphonic is an alternative of SonicStage coded in Java which can be run on Windows, Linux or MacOS. JSymphonic can be placed in the player itself to make your music available from any computer.
JSymphonic can transfer music from a computer to a Walkman or from a Walkman to a computer. Thanks to its "profile" feature, JSymphonic can store the configurations for several Walkmans on several computers.
Every models from NW-HD3 to NW-A80x are supported (you can consult the whole list here). ATRAC, MP3 and WMA files are supported and OGG, FLAC, APE, AAC, MPC and WAV files are transcoded within the application. FFMPEG is used to transcode files. Please consult the documentation to know how to install FFMPEG for your OS. Windows users can download FFMPEG from the download section.
Features
- support generations 3 to 7
- run on Windows, Linux and MacOS
- support MP3, WMA and ATRAC files transfer directly (WMA is only supported by generations 4 to 7, it is transcoded for generation 3)
- support OGG, FLAC, APE, AAC, MPC and WAV files transfer with transcoding using FFMPEG (FFMPEG must be available)
- read tag (meta-data) from MP3, WMA, ATRAC, OGG, FLAC, APE and AAC files
profile feature: store configurations for several walkmans or/and computers - multi-lingual capacity (English, French, Turkish, Spanish, Swedish)
log to file (used mainly to debug)
It’s a java program that sits on your device, and the other great selling point for me is that it works on Linux, unlike SonicStage.
So I now have a music player I can take into the gym, without endangering my phone, and I won’t be distracted by emails, tweets, et al 🙂