Sony S639 on OSX - Several Basic Questions!

[jferreir]

To make things simple, I'll just list my questions below. Please note that I'm using OS X.

1) How do you eject the "Walkman" drive?
- After I eject the drive, it immediately reappears.

2) How do I check/update the firmware?
- Is this even possible on a Mac?
- Transfer speeds are quite slow (13G = 2 hours), would a firmware update help?

3) How do I input playlists directly from iTunes?
- Is there any way to sync directly with iTunes? Here, I'm more concerned with podcast syncing (I'll drag/drop the music).

4) What is the optimal EQ setting?
- I read somewhere that some features were useless, while the custom EQ had a generic pattern. Any suggestions? (I realize that EQ settings are somewhat subjective).

5) Any other words of advice?

Thank you all for the help!

[artkavanagh]

1) Either: yank the USB cable as soon as the drive icon disappears and before it reappears. This doesn't seem to cause any problem (though I should add that my S639 has stopped working for what I think/hope are unrelated reasons);

or: use Salling Media Sync. It has a setting that stops the S639 from being recognized and mounted as a drive.

3) There's no really satisfactory answer to this one. Salling Media Sync will allow you to sync iTunes playlists but (a) it doesn't put them in the right directory on the player and (b) it's a bit hit and miss: there always seems to be at least one playlist that isn't sunc (past participle of "to sync"). Weird.

[artkavanagh]

Since posting the previous reply, over a year ago, I've found a more satisfactory way of unmounting the S639F. It also works with the W202 and presumably various other models.

In a Terminal window, just enter

sudo umount -f /Volumes/WALKMAN

and hit Enter. Then, if you've used Caps Lock to capitalize "WALKMAN" (case is important), immediately turn it off, because you will be prompted for your password.

I'd previously tried this without the "-f" switch and got an error message saying that the device was busy and couldn't be unmounted. The "-f" seems to make all the difference.