MAVickers

You can turn the animations off (I do) in the settings (I'm in the middle of a Sonic Stage 30 GB library backup so I can't find the setting right this second... sorry). Once you get your music into Sonic Stage you probably want to forget about moving them around. I find not having control of file locations pretty aggravating, but having gone this way for awhile I'm used to it. That IS a mystery as to why they used Access as the DB is easily hackable, but I guess they decided to spend more time developing that wonderful user interface than build a proprietary DB. Negative on that. I'm sure we would have seen a MusicMatch or WinAmp plugin by now if that were the case.

Don't be too bummed out. Recording in Hi-SP and then converting to MP3 doesn't sound bad at all (just a little time consuming). I do this for my church every week, but actually post at 16kbps mono to save on hosting space. It sounds mashed for sure, but it's all spoken word and completely understandable.

I'm wondering if the prices will start coming down.

This week: Alien Ant Farm - truANT The Choir - Oh How The Mighty Have Fallen Delirious - King of Fools Delirious - Glo Delirious - Mezzamorphisis The Eagles - Hell Freezes Over Green Day - American Idiot Geoff Moore - A Place to Stand Geoff Moore - Foundations Geoff Moore - Pure and Simple Oingo Boingo - Dead Man's Party Queens of the Stone Age - Rated R Queens of the Stone Age - Songs for the Deaf Queens of the Stone Age - Lullabies to Paralyze Slayer - Diabolus In Musica White Heart - Emergency Broadcast White Heart - Freedom

CDs: The Choir - Oh How The Mighty Have Fallen Queens of the Stone Age - Lullabies to Paralyze King's X - Live All Over the Place Vinyl (one of the reasons to have a MD recorder): Steve Winwood - Arc of a Diver Steve Winwood - Talking Back to the Night Steve Winwood - Back in the High Life Three Dog Night - Greatest Hits Christopher Cross - S/T Huey Lewis - Picture This Peter, Paul & Mary - In The Wind Peter, Paul & Mary - Moving Dire Straits - Brothers In Arms

I got a different but probably related problem. I went through the installation fine, but after reboot and starting SS I received an error message. I don't remember the exact text, but something to the effect of can't find WMA handler or something like that. Click OK on the error message, and SS goes bye-bye. After installing the regular way and rebooting everything was OK.

Man, that would be nice. I used Real when I had my NetMD unit for all the transfers. What I would have really liked is having a driver for MusicMatch.

Howdy. I have MP3s scattered across a bunch of CDs and DVDs in various archives and am in the process of importing them into SonicStage so I can get the music onto my HiMD (I have a 1st Gen unit). Yes, I'm well aware that I'm "stacking codecs" and generational loss, etc. Here's the rub -- First, I import the MP3s in SS. SS notices that I'm pulling the MP3s off removable media and asks me if I want to import after I've copied the files to my HD. I tell it no thanks, and then it imports the MP3s into the library. I then highlight the tracks that I've just imported and convert to the ATRAC format of my choice. All's fine until I remove the CD and try to play the track in SS. Instead of smartly noticing that the MP3 file is no longer there and to give the ATRAC version a try, it throws an error that it can't find the file and asks me if I want to remove the file from my library. If I say yes, it removes both the MP3 and ATRAC version of the track. If I say no, it just aborts playback. I thought I remembered in past versions of SS having the option of removing the reference to the MP3 file OR the ATRAC file. It seems that I don't have that option now. Does anyone know of a way to do get MP3s converted into the library without SS being hung up on the original copy of the MP3? There are two kludges I'd rather avoid - deleting reference to each MP3 by hand or copying the ATRAC files out of the "Optimized Files" folder into a temp folder and reimporting just the ATRAC files.

I've been having pretty good luck with SS 3.0 not crashing. I get the occasional hiccup where I finish transferring songs to the unit and then SS goes and does some thinking and doesn't come back. There are also annoyances every once awhile, such as not handling uploads properly although I have to say it's doing a lot better job than 2.x did. Overall, I've put enough faith in it that I'm importing my CD collection into the computer with it. I have about 400 albums so far and I'm in the middle of letter E. I'll probably try upgrading to 3.1 fairly soon.

I also have an NHF800. I speak out of sheer ignorance, but that noise (I experience it as well) gives the feeling of more solid mechanics on the inside than my NetMD models did.

I know this cat is already out of the bag, but I'll never trust SonicSuck to do the track combine for me again. I delete all the track marks directly on the unit itself before uploading -- even if there are 160+ tracks

An intriguing idea. I don't have one of the newer units, so I don't know how MP3's are arranged in the tree structure compared to OMG, but there may be a couple of considerations for drag and drop functionality - how to create the groups, how to order the MP3's in the various groups, etc.

This happened to me last week after I had combined about 30 tracks together. The convert just pooped out somewhere in the middle. I didn't have the time to try to split all the tracks back out, so I ended up "recording" the file back into the PC in realtime. Next time I'll be trying Marcnet's HiMD Renderer if SS fails in the conversion process.

For the PC, maybe, but unlikely for the unit itself. There may be a way to partition a >2BG MD to show up as two different drives on a PC, but it would take less effort (IMO) to create a unit that reads FAT32 than to create a unit that reads multiple FAT partitions off an MD.

I wouldn't say that I'm not interested in MP3 as much as Sony took their sweet time getting to this point. I wish I had the cash outlay to upgrade right when the new equipment comes up, but I don't. If I plunk down the money for a piece of equipment, I'm generally married to how it works for awhile...

1. 1GB. The ability to reformat 60/74/80m MDs and essentially double their storage capacity was a schweet deal as well. 2. Upload of mic/line-in recorded audio. No more playing back into the computer! 3. It's not an iPod.

I'm not going to get a 2nd generation device, at least not immediately. At the very least I'm going to wait for all you beta testers early adopters to weed all the problems out with the hardware and software. Besides, I just shelled out for the NHF800 and have started dumping my CD collection in SonicSuck.

Hrm... mine says FAT.

I just received an NHF800 for Christmas, so I'm going to hang with it for awhile... I'll come back in a year or so and see how it's going with the new units - bitrate support, transfer process, etc. If SS slaughters your MP3s on the way to the player then I may wait a little longer.

I have to say that's a strange thing to say since the model I purchased advertised it's recording capabilities and had both optical and line in. You could record in CD quality WAV or encode to MP3 on the fly. I had also used it over the course of a couple years and didn't experience the "sustained recording" problem you mentioned... unless sustained recording means something longer than 1.5 hours.

The iRiver device worked quite well. The product page for the most recent model doesn't seem to indicate recording to WAV, but it supports a variety of other formats. When you want to transfer back to the PC, you just plug in though a Firewire port and drag the files over through Explorer.

Well, that depends on what you mean by "affordable." I was using an iRiver hard disk device that records straight to WAV or DRM-less MP3 before I bought my recent HiMD unit. The iRiver device was about $500 US but can probably be had for less now.

Hey T, I'm in the exact same boat. I get a feed of the soundboard at my church for recording, then convert to mp3 and post to the church website. I've now grown accustomed to deleting all the track marks on the unit, but I'll have to give the SS join track function a try. I didn't know that existed and saw one of the admin make reference to it earlier in this thread. The upload function I have to say is a lifesaver, though. It was a pain to "play" it back into the computer every week.

I'm finding myself increasingly having to use ye olde m3u -> Nero -> ImageDrive -> SimpleBurner (SB) or SonicSuck (SS) solution for a variety of reasons. First it was just that some of my MP3s were converting over as silence. Now I'm crashing SS with an alarming amount of regularity. What a POS. Using the round-a-bout solution generally requires that you retype the track information in either of those software packages after conversion - either in the library or right in the MD itself. What I'm wondering is if either of the two solutions exist: 1) Does SS or SB consult cdplayer.ini? If so, is there a utility that can read the ID3s out of an M3U list and create a corresponding CD entry in cdplayer.ini? 2) I doubt that SS or SB consult cdplayer.ini on lookup, so does a similar utility exist for local CDDB databases, and is there a way to point it specifically at the database that the Sony products use? M3U2SBurner used to pull this trick off with SimpleBurner 1.x, but doesn't work with 2.0 (yet). Like most people I have several (like, 28) gigs of MP3s and I'm not feeling like re-ripping from my CD collection. Thanks for your help.

Agree on the quality of Xing encoders, but AA Pro uses Fraunhofer. I can't find a download link to the software anymore, but that particular link notes that the software uses Fraunhofer. I actually do for ripping my CDs, but for converting stuff I rip from vinyl I tend to prefer AA Pro. AA Pro has a much better queuing interface. That, and MM Jukebox has a massive memory leak in the folder selection dialog when finding the source files.