chomprock

i've had this problem with my NH600D for the last six months or so (it's a year old.) i'll be listening, and at some points, the sound will drop out. i'll hear the faint hiss coming through the headphones, which i don't hear when it's paused or off. no error messages pop up, the song keeps ticking away, but no music comes out. it seems to happen mostly at the same points in certain songs, but sometimes it plays through these points anyways (half to a third of the time.) is it the optics? the decoding? the analog/digital converter? the amplifier? a junction between two of these points? a poorly-encoded song? a poorly-written data track on the disc itself? it's not the headphones, it's not the batteries, it's not the source songs. it's been happening more and more frequently (used to be three or four songs per disc, but this last hi-md had well over half of them doing this) one thing i notice is that it seems to happen much more on hi-md's than hi-formatted 80 min. md's. does anyone else have a similar problem?

so i can't hack my north american NH-600D to play MP3s? damn. anything to avoid dealing with sony's god-awful software. without a doubt, the worst software i've ever been forced to use.

upgrading from version 2.x, it's even worse. i've been using it for less than an hour, and it's crashed three times (all while importing and deleting from my library.) i can't group together compilation albums (multiple artists on one album. they all register as albums for each artist with a single track), most of the features are not intuitive (selecting folders to import, for instance), when you queue two albums to transfer and the first isn't converted, it will convert and transfer the first, rather than transfer the second while converting the first, etc., etc., etc.... for how much i like my md, sonicstage has to be the single worst part of it. no wonder it's had limited mainstream success. does sony beta-test the software? is it designed with the help of testers, or is it solely a team of engineers? god, it's so incredibly frustrating....