5. Grab Your Music

Given enough time and dearth of choice in software, a user-created solution will eventually appear. In this case it is Grab Your Music.

There's a simple enough concept.

Grab Your Music is the open source solution for anyone looking to copy already transferred and encoded music from his or her Walkman back to a PC. Not only that, it allows playback of tracks through the desktop that have been previously added to the device, for those of us with space or time constraints. It's important to note that this only applies to MP3s rather than ATRAC formatted files but few enough people take the time to ATRAC their library.

GYM works well on the NW-HD series and with some effort it can be made to run on an NW-A though there are issues that can arise with both. Installation on a NW-HD is relatively straightforward. Installation to an NW-A is slightly more tricky, but possible.

GYM is easy to grasp and provides invaluable functions for multiple PCs (click image to enlarge)

To install GYM on an NW-A, it's necessary to run the KeyWizard provided from the player while SonicStage is open and with the folder architecture on the player unaltered. The KeyWizard can take a while to run its course, but it's only necessary to use it once.

Then, when prompted to use MP3 File Manager to transfer "tmp" to the player, import it to SonicStage (which should display it as an album named "No Rules") and export to the device that way. Then return to GYM to complete the installation.

The worst case scenario should be that the device will need to be formatted (using Connect will have hardened most users to this experience), which can be facilitated since GYM creates a backup when installed, or simply by creating a backup before installation.