sfbp

The following article may be absolutely irrelevant, but I have just spent an entertaining half hour disabling something called "plugin-container.exe" on all my PCs. Seems that this has been there in recent versions of Firefox, 3.6.4 and on. I noticed that it was taking 30-40% of CPU, which is a lot on a modern processor. As all it achieves is crash protection (which we were fine without before) it may well be that having this constantly going during Sonic Stage or other software that depends on polling loops and other stuff to communicate with MD units, you (and everyone else) might do rather well to either: 1. Stop running firefox when doing anything timecritical like sound recording, conversion, up/downloading, editing etc. ; or 2. Disable this STUPID addon which is running down your battery on laptop without your realising it (not to mention other possible effects) as follows: Here is the link to techdows.com. As far as I know it's quite safe to go to this site, and you don't need any software - it just contains instructions on how to reconfigure Firefox.

<blush> see the announcements. No big deal. Perhaps a bigger deal is the upgrade of the forum which I like very much. S

You think LAME beats ATRAC at a given bit rate? Changing the subject ever so slightly I just made an Atrac CD (first in a while) and as usual it sounds magnificent. One of the things I want to do is persuade the geek crowd that got Linux-Minidisc working to provide playback support for Atrac CD's.

Unfortunately the MD read-only technology is a bit off in left field. It uses completely different media and a completely different means to record the bits, IIRC.

The fact that you had an old version of SB suggests you have an old version of SS. How old? If I look at Help->About on SonicStage it mentions the version of Px Engine as: 4.16.15.0

Ok. We're not done yet. Next up is to see what happened to Px-Engine. This is a shared component that talks to the disk. If you did in fact swap drives before the failures started, I can well believe this is the root cause. Just one small problem.. I've never had to deal with this. The expert on such is Avrin. He can likely tell you (in the event switching to IDE drive makes no difference) what got messed up with the Px Engine. You might have to deinstall or install some other piece of Software that talks to the CD, eg Nero, Roxio CD Creator, etc. What comes to mind is maybe the update (to that) refuses to talk to SB. Have you updated SB to the last known version (2.0.05.25150)? Could it be as simple as that?

Try right-clicking the SB shortcut and doing Run As......

I wonder if c:\temp has not got write permission to all the people it needs to. I vaguely recall that XP-SP3 started enforcing some of the user control stuff that has been in Vista and W7 for a while now. I'm pretty sure I have a SB install on my SP3 machine that works, but I don't think I changed any defaults. Of course all files created under the \Documents and Settings\ root for a given user will have permission to that user. Also somewhere along the line Microsoft changed the "everyone" permission in ways I never understood. It may well be that you need to grant WRITE/CREATE/CHANGE (ie "Full") access to any user that actually wants to put files in that directory.

Ok, lets try another tack. Where does SB normally put its temporary files (converted) before transferring them to the MD? I'm thinking that may be a source of problems, if that directory had some sort of ACL protection before that changed.

You didn't tell me that part. (that the CD could be read BY SB). Do you have another computer?

I think you should TURN OFF DEP (except maybe for Windows itself - the setting in the picture).

I wonder if SP3 is to blame? Perhaps you and the other guy have the same problem. Sony may have relied on some sort of impersonation or possibly doing something that violates DEP (Data Execution Prevention). 1. Make sure the update didn't cripple your permissions (figure out how to make yourself an admin) 2. Turn off DEP for applications. See this: I have a feeling this may be turned on by default in SP3 Good luck - please let us know how you get on Stephen

Could it be that drive letters have moved around? Maybe SB is trying to read something from the camera instead of from the CD? Added: see my response to the other thread. Sounds like the first replier to you suddenly discovered the exact same problem.... hmm this thread was 2 years old, no wonder I couldn't find it.

Not too many challenges at the moment, seems like things are running pretty smoothly already. Good to see so many old hands are still hanging in here.

Hmmmm. Maybe you need to restart your computer (easy method) or go to Task Manager and see what is running that shouldn't be, and zap it. I've never heard of this particular problem but it may be true that you are running two copies of SS. Did you check the requirement that you need to be a power user or administrator? Maybe that's a problem if this laptop is :tethered: to your work domain somehow.

That's what got me into MD in the first place. . Push the lever up and let go immediately. It's been a while... (looks on ebay.ca)... Yeah just type in lip-4wm and take your pick. Not promising any particular one will be better than any other. But at this price you can afford to experiment IMO.

Sadly the only way to get an SP **file** upload is with not-generally-available, pre-release, alpha-test (whatever) software from the #linux-minidisc project. But Sonic Stage should be set to the PCM (WAV, 1411kbps) option as transcoding to Hi-SP may not be in your very best interest. I have taken to uploading my SP recordings (usually archive from vinyl) to WAV, editing with Sound Forge 9 (has a very nice automatic click removal process) and burning to CD for important stuff. Then I delete the files (.oma) generated during the previous upload, and reimport the WAV files (this is annoying because one has to type some of the artist info in again, sigh). THEN and only then do I convert to AAL (Atrac Advanced Lossless) which is great for transfer to any known rate of on-the-MD tracks. I'm sure the FLAC and AAC crowd will have a better way to do this, but this is using 100% Sony-provided software and hardware, and it seem to be quite reliable. That's all I have ever needed, reliability Not sure what you mean about the remote and skipping. The jog lever works fine. But it IS the weak point, so much so that I prefer not to use my RH1 as a player, but just for the magic ability to upload. Batteries: a lot of hoopla written - but I have managed to get quite cheap ones that work.

If by "different types" you mean different original source quality, yes I agree 100%. But currently I am leaning to the idea that if the original is good, then the compressed version will be good too. Sort of like the example I gave on compression of transcoded old VHS videotapes - the larger the file, the better, when the source has problems, as in my recent opera example. Perhaps you didn't follow the discussion on LP4 that I contributed to. Started out not quite sure why some LP4 recordings are as good or better than other recordings at higher data rate. Frequency cutoffs notwithstanding, it's clear (to me, can't speak for anyone else) that many recordings sound great (and un-artifacted) with the proper mastering. Avrin talked about this business of digital filters even for CD-quality stuff. I have tested a very wide range of different sounds that I expected to be tripped up on LP4, and were not. The really surprising one, I posted recently was some very loud organ music. Stephen

I repeat, DO NOT USE THE BACKUP TOOL.

I'm hoping you are running the 4.3 version (it's a mere 4 years old or so) of Sonic Stage. If not, all bets are off, and it may be wise to upgrade SonicStage. Go very carefully, read everything on the subject and find Avrin's "Ultimate" or "Ultimate 2" (!) version. 1. Whatever you do, do NOT run SonicStage Backup Tool; or mess with the registry via System Restore or any utilities. 2. Go to the My Library display of Sonic Stage (the middle one) and look on the main menu under "Toole" for "Start File Conversion Tool". Select that. 3. A new program starts (SS closes), and when you get to a box which has a box labelled "Add copy protection" which will ALWAYS be checked, UNCHECK IT. (leave the top box about deleting old files UNchecked, too). Wait for the database to recalculate how long it will take to process your files (If you ever did it before the second computation will show a much shorter time than the first - however it sounds as if you didn't do this already). Now the box should still be unchecked. Proceed. 4. When you return to SS you should still be able to read your files in SonicStage (play some?), but their names should all show as ".OMA" instead of ".oma". You have just unlocked or decrypted your files. Repeat whatever you did to move them to the other machine, and they should now play. It's advisable to run that decryption once a week or after every major upload. Otherwise you risk losing them when something bad happens to Windows. Keeping them on a different drive won't help, unless you decrypt them first. Let us know how you get on. Stephen PS - note to sysops - if this description is concise and works well, should you sticky this? I know I have answered it in one form or another many times. Probably a rename of the topic might make it easier to find.

I have now listened to the opera in question all the way through again. It's clear that the "problem passage" was just that. Most of it is fine at LP2, though I do tend to "cheat" and play it back on my RH910 which has the most luxuriant sound of all. As I said before, garbage in, garbage out, and since the problem was in the original there's almost nothing I can do about it, except leave the whole thing uncompressed, sigh. Right now I prefer to put up with 30 seconds of "bad patch".

I've seen plenty of good recordings with N707, R91, and R37, *without* battery box. Suggest you try it.

You don't need the BB for the R700. It's got a mic input which is eminently suitable for the BMC SP-2's. Stephen

Could you produce some facts to support your assertions? I would prefer it if we could avoid attributing negative attitudes or mindset - it doesn't IMHO help our ability to have a factual discussion. How would you explain Sony's almost wholesale adoption of MP3 and related technologies recently? Bought a TV from them lately? USB MP3 playback included. Thanks Stephen

Wiz, perhaps I could I ask you this - when did BBE get added to Sony's other (non-MD) products? As an MD-lover I sure wouldn't (at the time) have wanted Sony to spend effort on some half-baked enhancement to a technology I didn't use. We've already heard from Avrin how MP3 playback forced the removal of some other features from 2nd generation Hi-MD's. Isn't it more reasonable to suppose that they operated within technological constraints (limited memory, time to write firmware, engineering team less familiar with MP3), than to suppose malfeasance?