Walkman

Perhaps I bit later than I originally intended this post to be (as always) but now that I've finished my PMI exam, I have found spare time cropping up here and there that I'd forgotten I had. Regardless of how important or not an exam is, I always have a sense of guilt if I think I should be revising and in fact I'm sat in front of the computer / TV or just generally procrastinating. The last couple of weeks, I've had things spring out of no-where to keep me occupied. Last week I was invited on a spontaneous day trip to Sheffield for a friends birthday celebrations (a trip that ended up costing me far more than I had imagined but was enjoyable nevertheless) a this week saw an organised work social to see the first Die Hard at the cinema as part of the Odeon in Manchester's season of re-showing old films.

Anyway, on to the main topic. I've had my new Walkman (the 64GB NWZ-A867) for a couple of weeks now and I'm really getting used to it now. I was initially very sceptical about the touch-screen which was one of the main reasons for my holding off buying it without first wanting to try it out. Sadly the inability of my local Sony store to acquire any of these units meant that I lost patience and took the plunge and ordered it online. The generous capacity gives me enough room to store all my music as well as my podcast collection with plenty to spare. The inclusion of a separate podcast facility means that I can safely put the player on shuffle without fear of being interrupted by talking every other track - it also marks which ones you've played which is brilliant for remembering where you got to.

The SensMe function scans your music and analyses it and assigns it into categories or 'moods'. You can choose from time-specific categories or more general such as 'Energetic' and 'Relax', it still insists on starting the channels mid way though a song which I find particularly annoying but overall, it does a pretty good job of identifying the musical styles. The radio is much the same as my previous player as are the picture and movie modes which I can't really see the point in. I have no desire to watch a film on a screen smaller than about 12" let alone on something that can fit in my pocket but perhaps that's just me. Transferring music is quick and simple via drag and drop or from my preferred media player Songbird and the unit doesn't take too long to update the library after transferring new tracks - the SensMe channels also seem to be pretty efficient at analysing songs with an album's worth taking just a couple of minutes.

The unit itself has all the features I wanted - external buttons for play/pause, next and previous and volume although it can be a little tricky to tell the difference between the play and track skipping buttons and I've often mistaken the next track button for the pause button and skipped a track half way through - not so much of a bother with music but in the middle of a 90 minute podcast, this can be very annoying as the fast forward button isn't very fast. Still, for a device that is presumable designed to be used primarily via the touch-screen, I am grateful that I can still use it whilst it's in my pocket and will just have to hope that the more I use it, the better I will get at identifying the subtle differences between the buttons.

My final thoughts are that in general, it was a worthy purchase, I'm still having trouble getting to grips with the touch-screen - particularly the flicky scrolly action which I can't seem to master without accidentally selecting something several times - and also the shuffle feature which doesn't seem to work as it did on my previous device (whether this is a feature or a bug I'm still not sure but I preferred the old way).

Next week sees the return of the celebration that is the anniversary of my birth. At the moment there is a 50% chance that this will coincide with a late night work session although they have promised pizza which is always a motivational tool. I will be spending most of the night before baking treats for my colleagues. It still strikes me as odd that once you join the world of work, you are expected to buy cakes for other people on your birthday, before this point is has always been the other way around.

Finally, the music section and a musical first for this blog as this week sees my very first inclusion of a SoundCloud source. This is the latest release from Little Boots and was released for Record Store Day. She has made it available as a free download so if you like it, you can listen to it whenever you like!