NW-A45 Problems building database

[MarkCCollins]

I have a Sandisk 256GB SD card with approximately 220GB of mp3 music organised in artist files.  I have verified the data is on the SD card but the database the A45 builds is incomplete, stopping around 'S' in the list of artists.  The Folder view also stops short at the same point.  The device data shows firmware ver 1.10, 6.77GB/12.26GB of the system memory and 15.82GB/238.49GB on the SD card and total 42,698 songs.  This data seems to be correct for the data on the SD card but I think the number of songs is more likely to be the number it recognises.  I have been told that these Walkman will take 2TB SD Cards and no mention of an upper limit on folders, files, songs etc.  Although the manual does mention 3,300 songs limit, I must assume this is on the internal memory, not the SD card.  What would be the point of such a limit if it can take a 2TB disk?

The constant database rebuild is very frustrating and means it takes a while to switch it on every time.  I plan to have at least 500GB in the device so it will take forever to turn it on when it is fully loaded.

A good proportion of the album artwork is not displayed, although I can find no reson why it should not.

Anyone able to help with any of these points before I send it back to Sony?

Many thanks.

[JimInPT]

I had very similar problems with my A45 and a Sandisk 128GB card, including missing album artwork.  Tried everything I could think of, including doing several low-level reformats with different tools.  Nothing worked for over a week of frustrating messing with it - and that Music Center stuff from Sony is utter junk.  The Sandisk card looks and works utterly normally with other products including my camera and Kindle Fire HD10, but not the Walkman.

What DID work was setting the Sandisk aside and buying a Samsung 128GB Evo Select card - that worked first time!  I just put the card into the player and let it do its own format, then used "Beyond Compare" to move my albums over, although I'm pretty sure just a regular file-copy program would do the trick as well.  Take Music Center out behind the barn, shoot it in the head and bury it deep, then salt the earth - you don't need it or the frustration it causes.

So that's my first recommendation - try a Samsung product.  I don't know why it should be different, but it just works.

Second recommendation about album artwork - if you move your stuff over to a new card and it works, but you're still missing some artwork, try using MP3Tag software to examine the album(s) in question and make sure that EVERY track on an album is using exactly the SAME .JPG artwork file embedded in the track.  I had a few that drove me crazy until I thought to try MP3Tag and once I had it replace every track's art with a single file, the artwork displays fine on my A45.

Hope all this verbiage helps you - good luck!

[MarkCCollins]

Thank you very much for your reply.

I have in fact tried Samsung SD cards, although the EVO Plus rather than the EVO select.  Not sure at all why it should make a difference unless the timing is marginal.  Buying new SD cards at £80 or so each to try it out is not entirely attractive, but it is at least reassuring to know that others have experienced a similar problem and found a resoultion to it.  I also have a call not Sony support to see what they say.  I suppose they will say I should use a Sony card.

Absolutley agree on the Music Center which is bad, but I just copy across from my computer.  Hope to use SyncToy as that is so easy.

I will check it out again and see.

Thanks also for the steer on the artwork.  I will use Mp3Tag and check, but I'm pretty sure the artwork should be the same for each track.

Once again, thank you for taking the time to reply.

Mark

[JimInPT]

I wish Sony would try to design a compatible player to begin with and include decent third-party management software if their own coders aren't up to the job.

I have NEVER owned a player that was so finicky about the SD card, folder structure, album art files etc.  Have used Cowon, Sansa, Dell, Squeezebox and several other companies' products - this is my first Sony since a cassette Walkman back in the 70s and it's just awful compared to the others in terms of compatibility.  I've never had to do a thing with my large collection of WMA-format audio files other than just copy them over and use them.

I bought this NW-A45 only because my Cowon J3 (best player I've ever owned) had a hard limit of 16,000 tracks and I outgrew it.  I'm glad I finally got it hogtied and into submission, but it took me MANY hours of trying to figure it all out.  If not for the need for greater capacity, I would definitely NOT recommend this player to others; it's not worth the hassling with its finicky nature.

And one more Sony stupidity that could be easily corrected: even though it (allegedly) can use huge SD cards, and even though I have about 17,400 tracks loaded into mine, the song count below the album art onscreen is still limited to 4 digits.  If you have more than 9,999 tracks loaded, well that's just tough - it won't tell you the actual number.  Since you're working with 200GB card capacity, it's probably likely you'll find this out for yourself as well.

That would take what - about 10 minutes to fix the firmware code?  How long have they been making these things?

[MarkCCollins]

Thanks again for your reply.

I am not experiencing all the same difficulties that you are.  The song count as far as I can see, only features in the Unit Information.  I have more than 42,000 tracks according to that, although that is almost certainly the database count and not the actual.

Still cannot correct the artwork problem.  I have checked the image is the same on every track of an album, so it could well be another feature of the SD Card choice.  I am not inclined to buy another SD card at the price they are, so I have yet to decide if I am going to return it.

Having said all this, you should try the FiiO X7 Mkii, which is so execrably terrible I have simply given up on it despite spending £600 on it.  When it goes wrong it just crashes and you can spend all your time just trying to restart it.  The software is rubbish and far worse than the Sony software.  They cannot even get lists in alphabetical order and there support is totally non-existent.  At least I have been able to speak to Sony Support and have a call in with them, even if I do not hold out much hope.

[MarkCCollins]

Finally thrown in the towel on this one.  Having tried so many things I can only conclude the device has a major bug in the OS which means it loses its own indexing so after copying across tracks in folder structures, it just thinks the folders are empty, even thouhg the files did copy.  Consequently, the databse build is incomplete.

Interestingly, I also tried copying from iTunes which just transfers the tracks, so there is no folder structure, a huge list of tracks instead.  Almost all of the artwork was there though, at least for the tracks it included in the database.

I'm not sure I could have lived with the database being rebuilt every time you switched it on anyway.  How did they think that was a good idea?  Have they never heard of iTunes?

[Sam33.3]

Hey, not sure if you ever resolved this but i had exactly the same issues and i think i figured it out. I bought a sandisk 256 gb memory card on ebay. No matter what i tried, the card would fill up to around the S part of my music catalogue. After that folders would appear, they would show items had succesfully transferred with songs etc, but then when the walkman creates the database the folders would be empty. I tried multiple solutions from the forums. In the end i tested the memory card using a program called h2testw. This confirmed actually i had a fake memory card. It was only 30gb not 256!

This explained why the card stopped at a certain point. All other methods of checking the size of the card are fooled by the counterfieters, you have to run a more specific test. Upon research it seems that fake memory cards on ebay and other places is a massive problem. I'm replying in case anyone else has this issue and doesnt want to waste many hours like i did getting frustrated when it's just a fake card. 

[Montyprop]

I loaded up 450 gb onto a 512 Gb SD card but the data =base only went up to Paul and not William therefore was incomplete.  Why was the database not complete?

[paramount7force]

hi there I recently bought a Sony nw a45 and I have a couple of answers for you.

I have a 256gb micro SD card in mine which contains 40000 mp3s. I soon realized that the nwa45 supports that many mp3s but only upto 192 artists if you add 193 artists for example your last added artist will disappear. the solution for me was quite simple. I had 19 artist folders whos tags were sorted under Ministry of Sound 1, Ministry of Sound 2, Ministry of Sound 3 etc etc upto Ministry of Sound 18 where each folder contained 20 CDs. I simply changed that tags to Ministry of Sound 1 to 9 with 40 CDs in each which gave me 174 artist's and they all work now. as well as editing the tags for those I also sorted them for folder view.

Secondly to get all the artwork working is quite simple however time consuming for a large collection as you have to do a few thousand tracks at a time as your virtual memory will run out otherwise. Simply download Tag scanner and add your mp3s to it then select your music then on the top of Tagscanner near the end it should show a little image box and says keep click on keep and firstly change the size of the images to 600x600 and click apply then while the mp3s are still selected in Tagscanner click on the same keep button and click on recompress then apply. this will change your embedded MP3 artwork to 600x600 basic format instead of a progressive  format all artwork will 100% now work. it's also best to keep all the artwork in this format anyway as it is fairly universal I'm using my mp3s with artwork sorted like this on iPods, android and even on TV's through USB and all the artwork shows up perfectly.

I specially made this Sony account to answer this question. Cheers.