Rest in Broken Proprietary Headphone Peace
My Sony and I are not on speaking terms any more, and I see a more robust MP3/MP4 player in my medium-term future. Preferably when they release a 16GB Sansa Fuze.
But, until I dig through the deplorably-maintained “electronics box” up here (it’s hard to fathom how difficult it is to split your stuff between two continents and store the most important stuff in a one-bedroom apartment), I’m stuck with one working earpiece, some weird static out of the other, and a truly quirky piece of high-quality but very brittle crap.
This is my second set of headphones, following a factory recall due to a gradually-hardening wire (mine flexed like a spring by the end, especially in cold weather), and about my fifth set of rubber earphone socks, since they have a penchant for popping off and rolling under airplane seats.
This isn’t an iPod, where you indifferently just plug a pair of Coby white earphones in if they bust: because of the noise cancelling feature, this is a proprietary headphone jack, with a notch and everything, and while I have discovered standard headphones will work, they kind of defeat the purpose of the thing.
One of the stupid features of the Walkman is that after plugging it into USB it “rebuilds your library” (not a requested function, but required for its architecture) and puts your music pointer (that’s always how I envision the iPod play model) on the “All Music” alphabetical listing at the first song in your library alphabetically.
This particular feature probably makes about 0.5% of the population happy. Why not just remember the previous song and go there unless it was deleted? I often have my Fallout Boy albums loaded on the player, and they have a song called “‘Tell that mick he just made my list of things to do today.’” with the quotes on there. Symbols win as far as alphabetical organization goes, so I often have a racial slur flashing on my screen whenever I sync my player.
Anyway, I have also spent countless hours trying to make album art work (it requires an undocumentedly small-sized ID3-embedded JPEG-only image, and does not respect the normal AlbumArt.jpg that WMP throws in the directory). I don’t mind so much the embedding: to me it makes more sense than magic-named images polluting a music folder. But, the lack of documentation made this a really painful task.
It’s also dang near impossible to get video to work on the thing. Apparently the Fuze is more flexible and has a reasonable official tool available online to do the dirty work for you. After hours and hours of FFMPEG experimentation, I have a batch file that works most of the time.
I also struggled with the song years. It apparently can only read the song year from a specific ID3 tag (ID3 dates have a few ways to go in) in a specific, undocumented format. That took a while, too.
File names are another problem with the videos. I played with naming conventions for my video files for a while, which at one point involved extra dots in the file name. Turns out, this gives an “invalid file format” error on the video player (I thought this was an encoding problem for the longest time). It’s sniffing to the right of the dot to discover the file format, and it didn’t do an “rfind” to start from the right, so it thinks your file format is like .2010.walkman.mp4.
These bugs are unacceptable in my eyes, especially for a high-end player. No firmware updates available. I would be glad to give up its excellent noise cancelling for a decently robust set of core operations. But, for all this airplane travel, it has made sense for its relatively short lifespan.