5. Sony NW-1000, Continued

You can also look back at the list of tracks you've played in the past to choose music. Or you can play what the NW-1000 thinks are your 100 favorite tracks (the ones you've picked and played the most). It takes a while to build up the information to make this work, but it means you can easily have a core of favorite music as well as new music to try out, without fiddling around setting up a playlist on the move.

Alternatively, you can use SonicStage to set up some custom ways of navigating your music. You can link together artists that you think go well together, so you don't go from quiet classical to thumping death metal or audio books. SonicStage can set up groups automatically from genre information, but you can edit them if they don't suit you, building a map of how you want to connect artists like a fantasy Rock family tree. Press the Link button on the corner of the player to bring up the list for the current track.

Most of the controls on the Sony NW-1000 are obvious; the odd one out is the Link button on the side.

The Time Machine Shuffle is a bit gimmicky, with an animation as the player randomly selects a year. But a shuffle play of all the music released in the same year does often give you a mix of music that works well together (make sure your ID3 tags are correct if you want to use this regularly). And it's useful to be able to mark tracks to be deleted next time you connect the player up instead of having to try and remember what you didn't enjoy listening to.

With this many controls on the Options menu and the main menu screen , the Settings menu itself has the things you won't change often, like setting the clock and turning off the annoying beep between tracks, setting the screen saver options, changing the screen brightness or turning on volume limiting

As with the LG player, the NW-1000 uses a (different) custom connector on the USB cable, and a laptop-style PSU brick if you want to charge when you're not connected. As usual, you have to use Sony's SonicStage software to transfer music to the player. This is less irritating than with simpler players like the NW-E003, because the new version of SonicStage has extra features like ratings and artist groups that the NW-1000 integrates with. You can also create dynamic playlists based on rules like "choose all the music I've had for more than six months that I haven't transferred to my player". It's still much slower and less intuitive than other desktop music software, but SonicStage is finally catching up in terms of features.

Download the standard genre groups or link together the artists you want to hear together in Sonic Stage; finally a reason to consider using the software.

Concentrating on music playback means the NW-1000 stands or falls by the controls and the sound quality. The controls are comprehensive once you get the hang of them and the playback is the usual excellent Sony sound; crisp, bright and well-defined with lots of detail in the music. It's clearer than the 1 GB NW-E003, but some of the EQ settings are a little too crisp and bright for easy listening. The headphones are the usual Sony earbuds, which have a good sound but aren't comfortable for everyone. They have a very short cable so you can choose to wear them short or long.