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Adding a playlist to NWZ-A845

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alfm_sa
Visitor

Adding a playlist to NWZ-A845

I have a new NWZ-A845 and despite a number of atricles I have read I think it is an excellent product and produces amazing sound. The problem I have is in transfering playlists to the device.

I have tried using Windows Media player to sync to the device and this does indeed transfer the MP3 files but it will not seem to transfer the playlists either at the same time or sperately. I have also tried dropping the *.m3u and *.wpl files into content transfer and that just generates and error saying that this format is not accepted.  Even copying the *.m3u / *.wpl files directly to the [Music] folder does not work as the player contines to report that there are no playlists defined.

Please can anyone tell me how I can define a playlist - as with 14GB of tracks on the player manual selection would be impossible.

Thanks.

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

Accepted Solutions
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alfm_sa
Visitor

After much research and testing I seem to have finally found the solution.

In short is seems the PC was reading the Walkman player as a USB storage medium and not a music device. Windows Media Player apparently needs to connect to the Walkman in ‘MTP mode’ (which stands for : Media Transfer Protocol). You can tell if you have this by the fact that in Windows Explorer’s [My Computer] entry the Walkman will not show as a new drive and letter but as device with a icon as a picture of the player (when grouped this icon is in the ‘Other’ category)

This model of Walkman does not appear to support playlists in *.m3u and *.wpl format. This is supported by the ‘Content Transfer’ software’s message to this effect.

There is no visible difference in the ‘Content Transfer’ application window when in MTP and non-MTP mode.

My solution then was to re-install Windows Media Player 11 over the current install. This re-installed the protocol (or enabled it) so that when I connected the Walkman for the 1st time I received a balloon popup window from the system-tray to with a message such as “MTP Device detected”

When I opened up Windows Media Player, setup the device and pressed ‘Start Sync’, my device my playlists where automatically transferred and they are accessible from the menu on the walkman.

There must be another way to change the mode for the USB connection but this seemed the simplest and quickest.

When you have created the playlists you will see in the root of the ‘Storage Media’ for the Walkman device the folder [Playlists] which contains [*.pla] playlist files.

I hope this solution is of help to others with this issue.

Regards.

View solution in original post

5 REPLIES 5
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ag0000
Visitor

Hi, Just to confirm you need Windows Media Player 11 or higher.  Consult the manual (downloadable from the sony support http://support.sony-europe.com/DNA/software/index.aspx ) to confirm what file formats are supported. Also check your version of Windows and Service Pack is supported.

I am using Windows Media Player on W7 64-bit and a sync transfers playlists no problems?

profile.country.en_GB.title
alfm_sa
Visitor

Sorry, I should have said:

Windows XP - SP3

Windows Media Player v11

Content Transfer v1.3

The documentation (supplied with the player and online) does not say what playlist file formats are supported only the music files such as MP3, WMA etc…

I can of course create playlists with Windows Media Player but when I add them to the 'sync list' the files are transferred but no playlists are added to the player. As I said previously when I added dragged the created *.m3u or *.wpl files to the Content Transfer application the message generated states that the file type is not supported. I would assume because MP3 format is the primarily supported file type (as opposed to ATRAC in the previous model) that the standard playlist formats or *.wpl and *.m3u would also be supported.

The documentation only shows how to create a playlist in Windows Media Player and how to save one in a different format but no explicit statement on how the files are transferred or what formats are supported - so I assume they are either designed to be transferred when Windows Media Player syncs with the device or that can be manually added via Content Transfer or separately as a direct file copy via Windows Explorer.

Thanks for your comments so far.

profile.country.en_GB.title
alfm_sa
Visitor

After much research and testing I seem to have finally found the solution.

In short is seems the PC was reading the Walkman player as a USB storage medium and not a music device. Windows Media Player apparently needs to connect to the Walkman in ‘MTP mode’ (which stands for : Media Transfer Protocol). You can tell if you have this by the fact that in Windows Explorer’s [My Computer] entry the Walkman will not show as a new drive and letter but as device with a icon as a picture of the player (when grouped this icon is in the ‘Other’ category)

This model of Walkman does not appear to support playlists in *.m3u and *.wpl format. This is supported by the ‘Content Transfer’ software’s message to this effect.

There is no visible difference in the ‘Content Transfer’ application window when in MTP and non-MTP mode.

My solution then was to re-install Windows Media Player 11 over the current install. This re-installed the protocol (or enabled it) so that when I connected the Walkman for the 1st time I received a balloon popup window from the system-tray to with a message such as “MTP Device detected”

When I opened up Windows Media Player, setup the device and pressed ‘Start Sync’, my device my playlists where automatically transferred and they are accessible from the menu on the walkman.

There must be another way to change the mode for the USB connection but this seemed the simplest and quickest.

When you have created the playlists you will see in the root of the ‘Storage Media’ for the Walkman device the folder [Playlists] which contains [*.pla] playlist files.

I hope this solution is of help to others with this issue.

Regards.

profile.country.en_GB.title
ag0000
Visitor

Hi, nice one! - glad you identified the problem and got it sorted.

This could be a device driver problem? Other ways you might be able to handle this problem, although I can't test this as I am running W7, is when you have the walkman connected and it's in USB mode, you can go into XP device manager and try updating the device driver.  You need to set it to search for updated drivers on the internet.  If it does update the driver then just plug the Walkman into a USB port it hasn't been connected to before and it will install the driver afresh.  This should give you MTP mode then. Rgds.

profile.country.en_GB.title
bobster151
Visitor

To change the mode to MTP, go into device manager, right-click on the USB Mass Storage, update driver, choose MTP USB Device.

Vice versa if you want to change back to portable disk mode.