The answer is – when its a Sony.

Remember this piece of kit? Its the Sony NW-A1000 6Gb mp3 player we bought Chrystal for Christmas. I knew there were potential problems with it preferring proprietary file formats and proprietary software but, well, it looked good, and thats whats important for today’s teenagers.

From a practical point of view I would have preferred everyone in the house to have iRiver or Creative players whhere you can just drag & drop files or use Windows Media Player if you want to, but even I have to admit that this is a gorgeous little machine.

When it was new I had a few little problems getting it set up OK, but did manage to load music onto it. Then we started using Jayne’s PC to control it, since all the music the girl wants is on that PC. For some reason the average 14-year-old girl does not want to listen to Gang of Four, Yes, Megadeth and Baaba Maal but prefers Will Young, Sugababes and Robbie Williams.

The thing started playing up a bit with multiple copies of songs on it and then the software started locking up the PC, so I moved all Jayne’s music to my computer, formatted the Sony’s disk and tried starting from scratch.

Thats when I found that the Connect software was crippling my computer as well. I had processor usage of 100% and when I looked at processes running there was one called tinyhttp.exe using all the processor and about 150Mb of memory.

I did a search on Google for tinyhttp.exe and found dozens of sites complaining about the same thing and the limitations of the Connect software. One particular limitation seemed to be problems when transferring more than 1000 songs. Jayne had nearly 1300.

I eventually found that Sony look like abandoning the disastrous Connect software completely and are re-vamping their previous program, SonicStage. I downloaded that from their website and managed to get some music back on the player, but I spent most of this evening and yesterday doing it. I even left the PC on all night trying to process files and it didn’t finish.

When Sony first moved into the mp3 player market I heard comments about them having decent hardware let down by limited firmware (limited to their own ATRAC formats) and appalling software, which you had to use, but I thought they had been fixed after all the early-adopters kicked up a fuss. I guess the version number of the software should have been a dead giveaway – v1.0 – I always try to avoid 1.0 of anything.

For a serious company like Sony to release a product with such poor software is scandalous. It is the worst software I have seen in terms of being totally unready for consumer release – and I am someone who actually had to use Windows 3.0 extensively and remembers it well.

But its still a tremendously good-looking machine. Firmware upgrades and software releases will fix whats wrong with it soon. Although I love my ugly but brilliantly functional iRiver I know I’m never going to be able to download a better body for it. Although I really regret that pink Creatives were all out of stock in December I’m going to stick with getting the Sony sorted out.

Now that I have found the website ATRACLife I know where to get the latest news about improvements.