The A45 is a reluctant replacement for my Cowon J3, the best music player I've ever seen and heard, with one fatal flaw - a hard limit of about 16,000 tracks. It's an amazing player and I'm very surprised that Cowon has never updated with a similar model; everything they've released since has been inferior in my opinion.
So I sought out a new player with higher capacity; I've been buying CDs since they were invented and pushing 1,400 of them totals a pretty large number of tracks, hence the A45.
With almost a decade between the J3 and the A45, the Sony seems like a step backwards, with terrible Music Center that fortunately I don't have to ever use again (I use Beyond Compare to sync), an unattractive display design, no Search function and now this 4-digit limit on track count.
Yes, I'm complaining, but I spent a fair amout of money on it and it seems as if the Sony designers have never seen competitive designs and the details of this device are very rough.
I do like the hardware quite a bit, and the expansion ability, so with firmware improvements the A45 could be brought up to the 21st century; it just mystifies me that it's so relatively crude for a company that's been building Walkmans since the 1970s.
Ok, rant off; I'll hope to see firmware updates to improve it. With the seeming lack of interest in releasing updates, though, I don't have my hopes up.
By the way, does anybody know if there's a hard song-count limit built into the A45? It handles my 17,404 tracks so I'm hoping I'm not about to hit the same problem I had with the Cowon device.
Thanks for taking the time to read and reply!
j/k
