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Legal "Hack" / fix to SS for Music Uploads

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1kyle

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one way that "sort of Works"

1) import your music into the library -- you'll have to do this once unfortunately.

2) Mount a "Virtual CD" --there's loads of programs out there that can do this -- a 30 second google should find you what you need -- I can't be too specific here as I don't want Sony on my back for "Piracy" -- Would be funny to get thrown into jail for copying MY OWN MUSIC !!! but still.

3) record your CD to the "Virtual drive". from the Library -- you can mix / match tracks and although I haven't tried it yet you should be able to burn as much as can fit on to a DVD if a CD is too small.

4) depending on the "Virtual Drive" you have you might be able to bypass this step --otherwise create a Physical CD with Nero.

5) now you can burn as many minidiscs as you like from the CD.

My Virtual CD program doesn't need me to actually burn a physical CD so I'm lucky here.

6) You can copy the "virtual CD" to other machines .

7) the "Virtual CD" can also be loaded into the Sonic Stage (SS) library of other machines as well.

It's not perfect but at least it's A way of bypassing the most irksome restrictions of Sonic Stage.

I know this is not the most elegant solution but it works and does allow you to record and distribute your own minidiscs digitally.

If anyone has better / more workable solutions please post.

Cheers everyone

-K

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the problem is getting the data in / on to another computer from a minidisc.

For example If i've recorded some tracks and made a minidisc -- now I want a colleague to add / remix tracks on a different machine --we've got problems. For a start I won't be able (normally) to upload my minidisc music on to his computer which is what I want to do.

You'll get this type of error if you upload your minidisc on to a 2nd computer

user posted image

Duplicating Minidiscs is no problem on a single computer assuming you've got all the sources. It's when you want to share etc that problems arise.

Cheers

-K

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Actually the Sony ATRAC ===>CD conversion seems to work quite well --especially at HI-SP rate. The Sony ripping software seems to be fine at this point.

looking on a 'Scope (Oscilloscope -- an instrument which displays waves etc on a CRT device and is used a lot in sound labs) it shows that the difference between the 2 minidiscs is fairly minimal and much better than using an Analog transfer --even via a soundcard with a Digital out facility.

On some tests a few people were unable to tell which was the original MD and the "cloned" one so whilst this method is "cludgy" it does allow at least a decent level of quality of music to be uploaded on to different machines

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Thanks -- I'd never heard of Total Recorder --but for around USD 11,00 it seems to be well worth the price and "Does what it says on the Tin" --

The Powers of the Internet.

However the drawback of course in this case is you have do to it in Real Time --which if you are "cloning" a 1GB minidisc recorded in HI-SP will take a LONG time --- run the job overnight I suppose.

It's not too bad in PCM transfer however.

One other area that might be worth looking at is that the Minidisc is DATA so a Bit for Bit / sector by sector Disk copying program might yield some interesting results. One couldn't use the normal file copy as per Windows Explorer since there are obviously encrypted pieces of data on the disc which may also be either hidden or highly dpendent on the physical location on the disk.

A sector by sector bitwise copy should work in theory --provided the disk was accessed at the physical level rather than via the OS's (Windows etc) file system.

There are a few of these Disk cloning programs for Linux so maybe I'll have a look.

Cheers

-K

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  • 1 year later...

one way that "sort of Works"

1) import your music into the library -- you'll have to do this once unfortunately.

2) Mount a "Virtual CD" --there's loads of programs out there that can do this -- a 30 second google should find you what you need -- I can't be too specific here as I don't want Sony on my back for "Piracy" -- Would be funny to get thrown into jail for copying MY OWN MUSIC !!! but still.

3) record your CD to the "Virtual drive". from the Library -- you can mix / match tracks and although I haven't tried it yet you should be able to burn as much as can fit on to a DVD if a CD is too small.

4) depending on the "Virtual Drive" you have you might be able to bypass this step --otherwise create a Physical CD with Nero.

5) now you can burn as many minidiscs as you like from the CD.

My Virtual CD program doesn't need me to actually burn a physical CD so I'm lucky here.

6) You can copy the "virtual CD" to other machines .

7) the "Virtual CD" can also be loaded into the Sonic Stage (SS) library of other machines as well.

It's not perfect but at least it's A way of bypassing the most irksome restrictions of Sonic Stage.

I know this is not the most elegant solution but it works and does allow you to record and distribute your own minidiscs digitally.

If anyone has better / more workable solutions please post.

Cheers everyone

-K

Can anyone (including the original thread starter) identify the virtual CD program that would make this work? I'm very skeptical, having tried Alcohol 120%, Nero ImageDrive and Daemon Tools -- SonicStage 3.4 does not recognize the mounted virtual drive in the Options and I can only select physical drives as the target for "burning" audio/atrac/mp3 CDs.

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you could be right hpmoon (I must admit I haven't tried this) but I was just wondering why you would want to use this? The restrictions he tried to circumvene were since dropped (this thread is from Dec 2004) and you can now convert your own recordings to wav, rip music into SS without copy protection and even remove the DRM from older rips by converting them to the exact same bitrate of atrac (it won't be transcoded as one member has proven) but you can deselect the 'add DRM' checkbox

so sharing your own recordings and even your library (but that would be illegal :P ) has become possible through easier ways than decribed above (even if they would work)

if on the other hand your question doesn't really have a practical 'purpose', but you stumbled upon this thread, tried it and as it didn't work for you, you simply got curious into the program the poster used... just ignore the above.

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Actually if you look at the date of the original post you should see that it's well before SS 3.4 was generally available which have made this topic largely irrelevant now.

Cheers

-K

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Thanks for the replies, but the issue still is very much alive for me and maybe for all of us. I find it frustrating (like everyone else) that SonicStage 3.4 does not freely perform transcoding to MP3 and WMA formats, and one has to convert to WAV in such a way that each My Library entry has two (or more) files associated with it. You can then take the WAV files and access them from within WMP or any given MP3 transcoder to get what you want, but not within SonicStage. Once you're done, you have to deal with a bunch of WAV files that are hogging space on your hard drive. To my knowledge, there is no ability to mass-delete these WAV files once you've used them for what they're worth -- simply deleting them from the Optimized Files folder leaves a mess of errors when you subsequently access the Properties on any given My Library entry, and you have to go to the File Info tab on each one to "Delete File" for a non-existent file.

What I'm aiming for here is a mass conversion to WAV, for subsequent transcoding to MP3 or WMA, that does not write to my hard disk, and that avoids the problem described above (so long as my Options specify that the WAV file gets deleted after Transfer). If I can burn to a virtual CD-RW, I am thinking at this point that things move the quickest. Any thoughts?

On a side note, the only software I've found that purports to do this is "Original CD Emulator" (link), but I can't get it to mount a virtual drive for some reason. And it has the typically poor documentation of most shareware programs.

P.S.: Under the "Creating a CD" options, then "Writing Settings," there is a "Writing method" option called "Test only." SonicStage help does a poor job of describing it -- might this be what I'm after?

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hpmoon... it could be worthwhile to check the program HiMDRenderer by marcnet (a member of these forums and a great software designer as well)

this program allows you to convert all atrac files that are playable by SS (so your entire atrac music library...although I'm not so sure about support for atrac-lossless mind you) to other formats like wav, but also MP3 and OGG (again I'm not sure about WMA and as I'm not near my PC but typing on my mac, I can't check these things for you). I also believe it has a batch-mode so you can convert lots of tracks at once...

there is a forum subection on HiMDRenderer and the program can be found in the downloads section. It is free... but if you do find it helpful, please donate some money to marcnet so he can keep up the good work!

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