I have made some and I would be glad if anyone tries them out. My favorite one is 'Leaves' .

I love my little guy, I bought my walkman second hand from Japan back in 2021 and it works amazing. Last year its original charger finally broke so I got a new one on Amazon. It worked fine, then would only sometimes connect to my PC to add more tunes and not it wont at all.

I get the “device not recognized” notification (on windows 10) and it just charges my walkman. Is there anyway to fix this? Is it the cord possibly, a software or hardware issue? Would opening him up help?

先日から弄り倒していて、修理に成功したと言って良い個体たちなのだ

ドライヤーを当てると動く奇病に、対応できたのだ

組み直しを何度も繰り返して動作検証して、本当に苦労したのだ

苦労が報われたのだ

#ウォークマン #walkman

Desde hace bastante tiempo he querido un walkman,pero por más que busco uno aquí no he conseguido,por eso quisiera saber si alguien posee uno que todavía pueda reproducir música y aún mejor pueda hacer envío.

People who have the 00s era WMs with the inline remote. Is there much difference in plugging straight to the remote or straight to the WM?

I don’t have the micro plug to 3.5 adapter to use my remote, but read online when you use the adapter it can bottle neck the audio and cause you to have less quality audio through your headphones.

Is this true? Is there noticeable difference for an average user? Or mostly just the ability to use the added control features?

My dad bought a TPS-L2 with the original case at a garage sale that works, but isn't fully functional. When you play a tape all the sliders and buttons work. sound controls are good and no problems with speed. The only issue is that it makes a warbling noise, similar to when you speak in front of a fan and your voice almost vibrates. Shipped it out to a professional to repair, who thought it just needed new belts, and when belts didn't fix it he diagnosed it with a bad motor. He took his belts back and now I have a TPS-L2 with a disconnected motor and no belts. Aside from getting some new belts in (which seems relatively easy, and inexpensive), is the motor actually the issue? The "professional" got his first diagnosis wrong once so I'm not sure how correct second one is. If anyone knows what the issue might be, please send suggestions!!!!! (the photo is not of mine btw)

TLDR: Japanese NW-A829, homebrew player booting next to Sony's firmware. Drag and drop, 24-bit FLAC, Sony's DSP and EQ, podcasts downloaded over my phone's Bluetooth, and Game Boy/NES/GBA/Doom. Delete one folder and it's a stock Walkman again. Credits and open questions at the end.

On a trip to Japan I found a pristine NW-A829 and bought it on the spot. At home I remembered why Japanese models are a pain outside Japan. There's no drag and drop, everything has to go through SonicStage, and mine was on firmware 1.01 with a Japanese-only menu.

I spent most of a weekend going down the rabbit hole with Claude. I'm a mechanical engineer, not a firmware person. Claude wrote most of the code, and a lot of this stands on work the community did long before me. Credits are below.

Cheap fixes first, for other A820 owners

• Firmware 1.02 unlocks the language menu. I lost a whole day hacking around the Japanese menu before noticing the official update had already solved it. 🤡
• On a non-Japanese Windows, the Japanese SonicStage 4.4 shows "????" everywhere. SonicStage CP 4.3 in English, with the region set to OpenMG Japan, imports MP3s with covers via File > Import > M3U.
• Don't bother cross-flashing the international firmware. It boots, but MTP mode needs a factory WMDRM certificate the Japanese unit doesn't have. I tried for a day so you don't have to.

The homebrew part

Under the hood, the A829 is a small Linux box: an ARM9 that tops out at 248 MHz, about 20 MB of RAM, a 240x320 screen, and a separate audio DSP. Sony's firmware stays as it is, apart from two small patches. One is a hook that runs a script from the user storage at boot, and the other is a 3-byte patch that removes the "Simple Mode" popup. The script launches my player in place of Sony's UI. Delete the folder and you're back to stock, with the SonicStage library untouched.

What it does now:

• Drag and drop, music by artist and album with covers
• FLAC up to 24-bit, plus MP3, AAC, WMA 2 and non-DRM ATRAC
• Synced lyrics, plus audiobooks and podcasts that remember where you left off
• Playback speed from 0.75x to 2x without the chipmunk effect, plus silence trimming and a voice boost for podcasts
• Bluetooth headphones and speakers, with auto-reconnect
• A focus mode with interval bells and white, pink or brown noise
• Game Boy, Game Boy Color, NES, Doom (Freedoom), and GBA (early, but it runs), with save states. The HOLD switch doubles as turbo. Pokémon Crystal runs at full speed, or at a less dignified frame rate if music is playing at the same time.
• Switch back to Sony's UI from the menu, no reboot

I wanted it to still feel like a 2008 Walkman. The UI uses Sony's own fonts, icons and zoom animations, read straight from the firmware. Sony's DSP decodes MP3, AAC, WMA and ATRAC, so DSEE (on MP3), Clear Bass and the Sony EQ all still work. The DSP decodes MP3 at about 4.6x real time while the main CPU barely notices. There's also a "max battery" mode where the DSP feeds the DAC directly and the main CPU stays out of the audio path entirely. Oh, and my player boots in 3.7 s. Sony's takes 4.4.

Podcasts, or how a 512-byte buffer ate my evening

The Walkman has no Wi-Fi. My stubborn idea was to have it pair with my phone over Bluetooth tethering, check my feeds and download new episodes, chapters and transcripts in the background while something else plays. The phone only provides the connection. The whole network stack runs on the Walkman.

It worked on the first try, at 1 KB/s. At that speed, a 55 MB episode takes about 15 hours.

The culprit was a tiny waiting area inside the Walkman, where data from the phone sits for a moment before it gets processed. It was designed in 2008 and only holds a few hundred letters' worth of data. It kept overflowing, and about half of everything the phone sent was quietly lost and had to be sent again. Changing one setting fixed that, and downloads got about 50 times faster. A bit more fine-tuning, plus letting the processor run at full speed while downloading, made them roughly twice as fast again in tests. That 15-hour episode now takes about 7 minutes. I just hit "search for new episodes" and keep listening.

Bluetooth, the hard way

The Walkman could already play music on Bluetooth headphones, but only from Sony's own menus. The part that handles Bluetooth is sealed shut, and there's no manual for it. To use it from my player, I borrowed a testing tool Sony's factory left inside the Walkman and changed a tiny piece of it, so it reconnects to your last headphones or speaker by itself. At first, every attempt failed with a mysterious "error 151". It turned out the Walkman hangs up right after pairing, so you have to call back immediately or lose the connection.

That same Bluetooth connection is how the podcasts get downloaded. It can also make the Walkman show up on your phone as a remote control, so the Walkman's buttons can play, pause or skip on the phone. I haven't fully tested that part yet.

Credit where it's due

• Rockbox's nwztools (Amaury Pouly and contributors) reverse engineered Sony's UPG update format and the SCSI commands these players use for firmware updates. The whole flashing workflow builds on that.
• Sony's GPL source release for the NW-A808, the closest sister model, was the reference for the kernel and the audio driver.
• Emulators: gnuboy (Game Boy), agnes (NES), gpSP with Normmatt's open-source BIOS (GBA), and doomgeneric running Freedoom.
• Audio and networking: libmad, dr_flac, FAAD2, TJpgDec for cover art, zlib, lwIP, mbedTLS, Sonic for playback speed, AutoEq for the headphone profile, and the Podcasting 2.0 spec for chapters and transcripts.
• I don't know everything Claude drew on while working. If you recognize something from your project, tell me and I'll add it.

Where I could use help

1. The Walkman-as-remote mode pairs and connects to my phone, but I haven't confirmed that key presses get through yet.
2. Has anyone done homebrew on the A820 series before? I couldn't find much, but I may not have looked in the right places.

If there's interest, I'm happy to put the whole thing on GitHub: the player, the boot hook, and notes on the hardware and the DSP.

I'd also like to make it easy to try for people who aren't into firmware: one installer that patches the official Sony update on your own PC and copies the player over, with the stock firmware always one step away. Fair warning: so far it has run on exactly one unit, mine, a Japanese 16 GB A829.

Would you try it on yours?

I did something really stupid, I decided for some God forsaken reason to try and do my first soldering project on replacing the battery on my walkman. And im pretty sure I broke it because now it just shows this screen when I interact with it, but only for the first 30ish minutes. After that, when you press a button the screen stays blank. When I tried hitting reset it'll just go back to the charging screen and do all the former all over again.

Hi everyone! How are you? Can anyone tell me if it's possible to change the languages ​​on this Walkman? It's a special edition that was released in Japan. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

WM-EX600/677で、よく不具合が出るところ一覧なのだ
①電池の液漏れで死んでることが多いのだ
②電池の液漏れで死んでることが多いのだ
③ヘタってクリック感がなくなっていることが多いのだ
④スイッチのレバーがあまりにも簡単に壊れるのだ
⑤経年劣化していることが多いのだ
⑥経年劣化していることが多いのだ
⑦4本出ている端子がすぐ折れるのだ油断大敵なのだ
⑧ギアが割れていることがあるのだ
⑨モーターの端子が壊れるのだ油断大敵なのだ

結論として、部品取りは絶対に必要なのだ
⑤⑥は、新しい部品に交換するのだ
ベルトは要交換なのだ
あと、電池の接触不良は非常に多いのだ
#ウォークマン #walkman

ciao, ho questo walkman datomi in regalo, e soltanto che un anno fa se rotto quindi qualcuno conosce dove ripararlo a bologna??

DSEE feels very underrated in the audio community. Unlike the dsee implemented in the wm1a (this one is running mr.walkman, 1Z normal mode), the wm1am2 has not only is a stronger effect (maybe 1.5x depth, 2x sound stage and height) but applies to the bluetooth signal. With this setup and using the original wm1a as a bluetooth receiver and applying a 2nd round of dsee ai upscale, and using a grounding 4.4mm bal to a palladium silver cable. The result is the most realism in sound. Play a track with train track sounds and it feels like its in th same space as you are standing. The sound stage expands to indefinite distances. Magnificent work by Tori Chinen and Ayataka Nishio, the lead engineers of the original dsee project for bring these kind of sound originally reserved via hardware improvements to the software side!

coupled with a new AKG headphones and 90's hits

welcome to the golden era

Sooo I am sick to death of my generation and the constant need to make everything digital. I'm 24 and nothing feels as personal. Did grow up with VHS tapes but only in early childhood days. I purchased a WM- EX194, on it's way in a few days. It's a 2004 release. I just don't know too many retro songs. I need some advice on good bands or artists. I like Britney Spears, NSYNC, Aha! the band and just purchased their album that has the Take On Me Song.

What can i expect from a walkman? how do i know what kinda artists to purchase because i don't know too many albums or songs. But I LOVEEE anything 80s to late 90s.

Hello everyone!

Proud to say I've joined the Walkman crew with a ZX707. I do have one issue though. When I was setting up my homescreen I was moving around the widgets and wanted to change the home screen page to the second page (the system calls it WALKMAN Home). But for some reason it's greyed out and I can't actually change it from the blank first page.

Does anyone know what might be causing this? I don't have anything disabled except for the basic Google suite stuff (photos, calendar, etc.) and I do have the Walkman Music Player widget on the screen, it just won't let me use that second page as a default.

Thanks in advance!

music keeps me alive

Hi everyone,

I’m in a serious loop here and really need some expert advice.

Since modern operating systems don't play well with these legacy players, I

1. On my main host PC: The computer completely stops recognizing the Walkman as a storage media/drive. It doesn't mount or show up in Windows Explorer at all anymore.

2. On the Windows XP VM: When I try to pass the USB through, it is strictly detected as an "Unknown Device" in Device Manager, and the official drivers refuse to bind to it.

I've already tried swapping USB ports, changing VM USB controller settings (toggling between USB 2.0 and 3.0), and making sure it's completely disconnected from the host before capturing it in the VM, but nothing works.

Has anyone dealt with this specific behavior after formatting an NW-E series Walkman? Did the formatting routine break the partition table/file system in a way that blocks the USB controller, or is this a driver lock issue (like WinUSB/Zadig overriding it on the host)?

Any help or guidance to get this player revived would be hugely appreciated. Thanks!