maggior

Have you tried ripping the CD in the PC with another program? I have encountered a good number of CDs that play fine in stand alone hi-fi equipment that either refuse to rip in a PC or take hours to. SS has its faults, but you may not be able to blame this issue on it.

I just confirmed for myself that the album information is not lost when you delete the albums but chose not to delete the files. I did not realize (though it makes a lot of sense) that .oma files are tagged - much like mp3 files. So, when you drag the oma files back into sonic stage, the albums are reconstructed. This little trick will save me a lot of typeing - thanks for the tip dex Otaku!! The entire procedure may seem a bit kludgy (well...because it is), but it works...which is the important part. Cheers! Rich

But when you delete the tracks from SS, wouldn't the album information be lost as well? When you re-import the OMA tracks, will the albums be reconstructed? If not, then this could be painful since the names of the OMA files won't reflect the album info. The granularity of the "massive import" would have to be at an album level then. I would love it if SS will reconstruct the albums when re-importing. It would make my life MUCH easier!! :-). Rich

Even if you find a way to batch convert outside of SS, you have the issue of importing the files into SS. If you drag all of the files in at once, you create one large album (probably not what you want to do). You will have to drag the files in an album at a time and with each drag, label the artist and album name. When you drag mp3s in, the tag information is used automatically to create the sonic stage album and tag the ATRAC tracks. I'm not sure what will happen when you drag mp3s from multiple albums in at the same time - it may create the individual albums. Give it a try. Having said all of the that, batch converting is easy. Once you have organized your tracks as you want in SS, change the view from album/playlist to tracks. Tell it to sort on date imported. Now, scroll down and select all of the tracks you've just imported. Then, right click - the menu will have an selection to convert. Select the bit rate you want and SS will convert each track. Now SS will have both the mp3 and ATRAC files. If you want to delete the mp3 files, you have to right click on each file and select properties. On that tab, you will see both the mp3 and ATRAC file. If you want, you can delete the mp3 file from here. If you just delete the mp3 file from the hard disc, you will encounter errors in SS when you try to access the track. I hope this helps. Rich

I've been using SS for 4 months now and am having no problems, aside from the "multiple album upload" issue that I've worked around with my "priming the pump" method. I have almost 40 GB of music stored in it at 105 kbps! It has never crashed on me. SS gets a real bad rap outside of these forums. Any review you read of a Sony DAP product (be it minidisc, flash, or hd based) mentions SS as a major drawback. SS is way better than it used to be, but it will take time for its reputation improve. Now that much of the DRM crap has been loosened, it's a much more usable product. But it may be a bit late - Sony is playing major catch-up in the DAP arena. For me, the sonic quality of the ATRAC coders, gapless playback, and audio quality of the hardware make up for any flaws SS may still have. Rich

Have you tried the workaround that I posted earlier in this thread? This should address hangs, not sure about crashes that other people are reporting.

I've noticed that SS runs a lot of threads. My thoughts were that it is a timing issue with thread synchronization. Could be a bug in the driver too. Whatever it is, it would be nice if it was fixed :-). It would probably be a good idea to add this info to a faq or pin it. Everybody must run into this problem.

Funny that I just started experiencing the same thing last week. I'm not sure why it suddently started happening to me. Perhaps there is an update that's come out of microsoft recently that affects this? After banging my head against my desk last night, I finally figured out a workable solution. Here is what I did: 1) Select a single album to transfer and press the button to transfer it. 2) Once you see the %transfer for the first track of that album advancing, select your other albums and press the button to transfer them. You will then see these other albums added to the list. Once it finishes the first album, it will continue on with the others that you have requested to transfer. It's as though you have to prime the pump with a single album and then you can pile on as many as you want. I was at a point last night where I could not transfer multiple albums at once at all. The method I describe above worked for me with 2 discs that I made last night. Hopefully this helps you guys. Rich BTW, I'm using an MZ-RH910 and SS3.3 on a Win XP system with SP2.

hmmm...this is an interesting idea, but won't work well in my situation. I am converting files from multiple albums at once to simulate a batch mode. All of the optimized files go into a flat directory structure (i.e. none) in "optimized files", so it is hard to look at them and determine which files go with which album. Doing it an album at a time would be inefficient for me. Based on the responses, it sounds like there is no way to configure SS 3.3 to do what I want when I convert wav files imported from the hard disc. Guess I'll just have to deal with this one last quirk. Could be worse. Thanks for the suggestions. Rich

Thanks for the input - glad to get some assistance on this one. Yeah, that is buried. Didn't know that menu existed - good to know. However, this setting is for when you are transfering a file from the library to the minidisc reocrder and a conversion needs to take place. The scenario I am dealing with is I have imported WAV files into the library and I am converting them prior to performing a transfer. I'm doing this to save space on my hard disc and to minimize the time required to transfer to the recorder. Any other ideas? Thanks!! Rich

Can you tell me where this configuration setting is? I see many settings for when you are importing CDs, but not when importing files on the hard disc. Thanks for your help!! Rich

Hi - I recently purchased a mz-rh910 himd minidisc recorder to be able to listen to live music that I've downloaded as bit torrents. The procedure that I've been following is that I import each concert into the library as wav files and label the album. Once I've imported the albums, I then go into the track view, select all of the tracks that I've imported, and convert them to atrac. After doing this, each track has 2 versions in the library - an atrac and a wav version. I then have to go through the painful process of deleting the wav file individually through the GUI. Deleting the wav files from the hard drive doesn't work because when I try to copy the files to the minidisc, it complains it can't find the files. Is there a way to remove the wave file entries without having to go through the pain of editing the options for each individual track? I've found Sonic Stage to be a bit cumbersome to use, but have been able to get around things except this last item. Any suggestions would be helpful. I am using SS 3.3 on a PC with XP Home Edition installed. Thanks!! Rich Maggio