Official Slacker Forums

[Andrew2]

A week ago, I discovered Sony's somewhat-recent series of walkman: the X series. I tried out the slacker app in the store, I was pleasantly suprised to find some nice songs.

Little did I know how much trouble I'd be having with Slacker.

Backing up a bit, I ended up buying the walkman for $300 because of it's built-in slacker support and the high raves for it on multiple reviews.

After getting it, I tried to sign up for slacker earlier today. I spent at least 20 minutes aimlessly wandering around slacker.com looking for a way to register my device.

The "My Account" link gives me a 404 error. Clicking on "Portable" and "If you already own a Slacker Personal Radio Player Click Here" returns a database error.

I thought it might be my browser, so I switched from firefox to internet explorer. Internet explorer couldn't even load the page before crashing.

Does this happen often? It never crossed my mind that a heavily-featured application on the $300 product could prove to be such a failure. How can I register my device?

I am by no means a noob when it comes to tech, and Slacker has been driving me crazy.

[MikeV]

I took a quick stroll over to Sony's website to look up the manual for the X-series. What shocks me is that for a feature that Sony promotes, there is NOTHING that I could find in the manual about Slacker, how to set it up, or anything!

I would GUESS - but please don't quote me on this - that it gets registered and used just like Slacker's own portable devices. Since there is no information that I could find in the manual on Sony's website about this, I have no idea if this will work or not.

Try going to www.slacker.com/start and see if you can complete that process. You will need an 8 character portable ID that should be somewhere on the device, probably in a menu or "About" screen. That will associate the player with your account (if it works). Then it will also allow you to select the three stations you want to load onto the Walkman (yep, only three stations max on the X-series). If you want to change stations in the future, you can do this just by going to www.slacker.com and logging into the Web Player. Click the Portable tab, remove a station you don't want anymore, and select a new one.

After that, you should be able to use the Walkman's WiFi connection to download music to it. The initial load will take a lot longer, as it will download approximately 100 songs per station to the device. Future updates/refreshing will only download as many songs as you've listened to. When you add a new station, it will also take a while, as it is again downloading 100 songs for that station.

Hopefully that gets you going... I would look and see if there's any separate manual or instructions on how to link your Walkman with Slacker... surely Sony would include SOMETHING about how to use Slacker, since they're promoting it as a feature of the device!

[GerryV]

I hear you. What enticed me to get the Sony X series were the Slacker feature and Sony's misleading free 100 music downloads (The latter is actually not applicable if the unit is NOT bought from SonyStyle direcrtly though non-sony retailers have that (false)ad on their sites - but that's another story).
The Sony player provides the portable ID number in itself. However, when i was registering it on the Slacker site last night - and up to this morning -, it wouldn't go in. I keep getting the message on my sony "go to slacker.com open an account" etc. For a measly 3 stations i don't think it's worth the trouble. This is exactly what prompted me to get the G2 this morning.

[RomeE]

Just an update, the 404 error in the original post should be resolved in a website push in the near future (I believe this evening, but don't hold me to that..).

Best regards,
Rome E
Slacker Support

[MikeN]

I have had my Sony for several months...no probs...knock on wood. I had three G2's in three months - each of them died within two weeks......then with shipping back and forth...etc Sony is a much hardier piece of equipment.

FIrst - you need to register your portable device ID with your Slacker account. The device ID is in the Sony settings area...secondly, the I think the SOny only updates slacker stations in wifi mode - not USB....third your wireless router need to be compatible with slacker....liksys and netgear are - right out of the box....DLINK uses a default IP address that is incompatible with slacker...and muct be reconfig to use a different address.

You should be able to refresh easily thereafter.

[MikeN]

Router issue......you cannot use a wireless router setting of 192.168.0.1 to connect to the slacker application. Says so in the G2 manual...assume same for Walkman series.

That is a default setting for many routers. You may need to reconfig your router to use a diff default 192.168.1.1 or something.

Sorry for the wrong numbers in previous post.....this is probably why you CAN connect to youtube etc and not Slacker.

Linksys uses a diff default so it works...DLINK will not.

Good luck

[Jim1348]

I have been aware of the Slacker function on the Sony X Series Walkman, but have yet to see these in stock at Best Buy. I have looked at Sony's website and the places they list locally as authorized retailers don't appear to be carrying these. What store(s) are you folks seeing these in stock at?


Here are links to Best Buy. I didn't find them under X-series, but with a different term. Unfortunately they don't seem to be carrying these at the Best Buy stores near me.

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp ... 8087587675

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp ... 8087587328

[MikeN]

I bought mine directly from Sony.....arrived within a couple days. Worked right out of the box. The only problem I had was with the USB connection.....apparently you need to have the latest windows media player for it to recognize the player...once I did that - worked like a charm.