Azureal

Thanks a ton for the quick response and for the link to the PDF manual. I have my unit with me and I also have the cable but the battery is dead and I could not figure out why it would not play disks. The unit shows up as a drive only when connected with the cable. On the same page of the manual which you cite, it also says that it is not possible to charge the battery from the computer while connected to the bus power. Thanks again for finding the answer for me. Azureal

Should my MH DH10P charge from a USB port? When plugged in, I see the "OPR" light on but not the "CHG" light. I have no CP installed on this machine although I did install the PA_Driver from Sony and the device does show up as a USB Mass Storage device assigned to drive e: on this machine. Thanks for any advice, Azureal

Marc, Many thanks! I'll be testing this out tonight. :-)

Hi Marc, Regarding v1.00 beta 2. After using "Find" in batch mode catalog a large directory of oma files for conversion or select a single file in batch mode for conversion. then beginning the conversion conversion completes fine, no issues. resulting output files have the ID3 tag "Album" field is truncated to some number of characters less than the actual string length. this does not seem to occur for every album title, but if it occurs for one track on an album, it seems to be the case for all tracks with that same album title. I have seen some titles truncated as short as six characters and others truncated at seventeen characters. It seems to be quite random. In file mode single file selected for conversion. resulting output file has the correct ID3 tag "Album" field resulting output file missing the ID3 tag "track number" field. I have updated my findings here with new information regarding the pseudo random length of the truncated field. I'll be happy to help you test or reproduce the issue if you like. Once again thanks for the huge effort with your tool, it really is very useful for me and for so many others. :-) I tried to report via the built in reporting mechanism but it is crashing on me. Azureal

Marc, Regarding v1.0 beta 2, after using "Find" in batch mode to catalog a large directory of oma files for conversion and then beginning the conversion, the resulting output files have the ID3 tag "Album" field truncated to 10 characters. Also, in file mode, a single file has the correct ID3 tag "Album" field value but is missing the "track number" field from the ID3 tag. I posted similar message on your website. Thanks for the huge effort with your tool, it is so useful for me and so many others. :-) Azureal

After several attempts at uninstalling and reinstalling CP v4.3, I finally ran across a few posts about issues with this version and backed down to v4.2. Everything is working as expected now. I am able to manage and manipulate music on both HD5 units.

I have the Connect Player v4.3 installed on a Windows XP Pro machine. I have used this machine to manage my ATRAC3/plus library of about 20GB for at least one year. I regularly use the CP interface on the PC to play music while I work. Recently, I downloaded some music from the Connect store and wanted to update my HD5 player with the new titles. When I connect the HD5 unit to the PC, CP v4.3 recognizes it, however when I try to access it CP crashes with the error "Omgjbox.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close.". I have connected another device, my MZ-NH1 and I am able to read disks and manipulate music on it without incident, this is not the case with the HD5. I performed an "Initialize HDD" and a restoration to "Factory Settings" from within the "Options --> Initialize System" selection on the HD5 menu. After performing this on one occasion, I was prompted to re-authorize the device, which I did via Connect and then it appeared as if I was going to be able to copy music to the device. I selected a bunch of albums and clicked transfer. The transfer began but CP v4.3 crashed again. This time it left the unit in a state where upon disconnection from the PC, it had an error on the screen about a corrupted database. No music is on the device now at all. I have a second HD5 which belongs to my wife which exhibits the same problem. I downloaded the CP v4.3 installer but it will not install over the existing installation, it seems I will need to uninstall CP and reinstall it to get a clean installation. How will this affect my library of music? Does anyone have any suggestions on what course of action to take? tia, Azureal

I realize that this is a really old thread. I thought I would mention that I just ordered the Sony CDX-GT610Ui from Crutchfield. I received the unit and was to install it this weekend, unfortunately they sent the wrong wiring harness for our vehicle, so I am going tohave to wait a few days to see the unit in action. The unit is supposed to play ATAC3plus CDs as well as CDs with MP3, WMA and AAC files stored in Joliet format. I have our entire library of music stored as ATRAC3 and ATRAC3plus, so this player seemed like a no brainer for us. I would love to see that the unit will control one of our HD5 DAPs via the USB unput. I was originally interested in replacing the stock radio head unit with one that had an auxiliary input. I was pretty happy to find a few Sony models with all of the features this one has. If anyone is interested, I'll post some results of my experiences with this unit after I get it installed and have a chance to play with it for a bit. One other note about this unit is that it has an iPod interface cable directly connected, go figure, I ordered it knowing that was there but wanting the other features and one day before the sad email from the Connect Store folks about Sony abandoning ATRAC3/plus...

Hey Guys, Marc's HiMDRenderer worked like a charm. As Borat suggested I used the batch processing mode and left it over night to crunch about 200 .oma files. HiMDRenderer transcoded the files from .oma into CBR 192KBps which actually do not sound too bad. All of my source rips into SonicStage are at 256KBps or higher ATRAC3plus. Not only did it transcode, but it properly populated all of the ID3 metatags for each file, and numbered the individual tracks as well as placed files in a directory hierarchy based upon artist/album/track. Very useful utility. Thanks for the advice Borat and thanks to Marc for his efforts on the tool.

Fantastic Borat! Thanks for the tip, I'll check it out this evening and report back. This will be very convenient. Thank you again.

Thanks Nav, I thought that might be the case after looking around in the app and trying a few things. I have all of the original CDs so I'll just re-rip to mp3. In the past I have used EAC to rip and Lame to encode. Any thoughts from anyone on other useful tools out there to rip to MP3? I think that SonicStage will do it too and also pull all of the CD data from CDDB. That might be even easier for me. Thanks again!

I cannot seem to find a way to export some of my ATRAC3plus files from SonicStage to MP3 files so that I can burn them to disc. Am I forced to just rip the albums again to MP3? I have the options to create Audio CD, create ATRAC CD or create MP3 CD, but the latter doesn't work if the files are in ATRAC format. Do newer versions of the Connect software allow this sort of trans-coding from the library?

I agree with Stuge. These guys helped me do exactly the same thing with a 20+ GB library of ATRAC3+ music. I used the SS Backup tool to back up the entire library (slow and time consuming). I did my back up onto a USB 2.0 drive. I then wiped my machine rebuilt it and installed SS 3.4 fresh and use the Backup tool to restore the library. I had virtually zero issues. I did need to connect to 'Connect' for some reason to 'authorize' my DB before the restore would begin. I am sure this is to keep one from making a copy of their database in this fashion and sharing it with friends/family. Some of my ripped albums have DRM (ripped with older versions of SS), others are DRM-less thanks to ripping in newer versions of SS. Good Luck!

Worked like a charm! I had to go through some authentication process via connect, but I seem to be able to access al of my music on the new machine now. Thanks for the advice folks.

granbajo, Excelent, I'll give this a try and definately keep the old machine around until I am sure! Thanks. Stuge, I have probably 98% of my music ripped into Hi-SP, a few items where MP3 but converted to Atrac. I guess part of my concern is whether I will have problems with DRM wrappers on the ripped Atrac music. I am not positive, but I think it was only recent versions of SS which allowed CDs to be ripped to Atrac without DRM. I may find that I need to go through my collection and remove the DRM as I have read others are able to do. Thanks for the input guys, I'll let you all know how things turn out!

I have 20+ GB of music that I wanto to move to a new machine. Most of the data was imported in pre 3.2 SonicStage. I have upgraded several times over the past two years or so. Currently running SS 3.4. Can I use the backup tool to backup to a common location and then restore to the new machine? I suspect that I know the answer to this, given the issues with SS over the years. Any thoughts or ideas will be appreciated!

My wife and I recently bought two NW-HD5s, one each . Hers is red mine silver. Prior to their arrival, I was reading up on the units and found the idea of having to "Authorize" the units disturbing. I have used NetMD/HiMD for years and had most of our music library already ripped to Atrac3Plus Hi-SP and in SS 3.2. Interestingly, as you state, there was no request for any "Authorization" of either unit when connected to the computer with the SS 3.2 install. The CD which came with the units has SS 3.1. Perhaps if I had installed fresh with this version we would have had to perform the "Authorize" task. I have not tried to connect either unit to another computer with SS 3.2 installed so i don't know what efect it would have ...

I have done some transcoding from source rips at ATRAC3plus 256 down to ATRAC3 132, sound quality-wise I don't hear a problem, the 132 disks sound fine for that rate. The real issue in my mind is the fact that SS does not just transcode on the fly and transfer the file to the HiMD disk, it actually stores the transcoded version of the file on the HD with the higher rate file. You end up with multiple copies of the track/s stored taking up space ....