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Will Defraging Mess Up My Music

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mutant1345

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i know it may not do much, but i am wondering if defraging the disc, would make anything unreadable, i went to defrag my hard drive and decided to analyse the disc and saw it was pretty much JUST fragmented files, which is iunderstandable completely

but yes, please any info on if i would run any risk of making the disk unreadable by the player or sonic stage

Thank you-

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No.

It wont even make a difference to the fragmentation of the disc. I took a reformatted 74min disc that was about 3/4 full of audio that was already in SonicStage and did the (rather reckless maybe, but hey, you only live once!) step of defraging it. Before defrag (like you mentioned) it was 99% fragmented (apart from the free space). When I started the defrag, it went for about a second then said some files cannot be defraged and had made no difference to the data on the disc.

Dave

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There is another issue here, defragmenting a disk causes a lot on stress on the recording head (as a result of the constant reading and writing of the files that are moved), and therefore shorten life of the recorder. So in the long run it may not be worth it.

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aye, thats a good point, but what I'm saying is that it didn't even attempt to defrag most of the disk. I assume this is becuase the audio data is not stored as part of the file system, i.e. when you browse the disc using a file explorer, it cannot show the actual audio data becuase they are not 'files' as the operating system understands them? Is this correct?

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As I understand it is the ATDATA file that contains the music data. I think all the files in the HIMDHIFI folder provide a file system for the music data (which sits on top of the FAT file system), which is only readable by the Hi-MD unit and SonicStage (and Simpleburner etc). As for being unable to defrag the volume, I think its because due to the ATDATA file being so large that there is insufficient room on the disc to rearrange this file.

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As I understand it is the ATDATA file that contains the music data.  I think all the files in the HIMDHIFI folder provide a file system for the music data (which sits on top of the FAT file system), which is only readable by the Hi-MD unit and SonicStage (and Simpleburner etc).  As for being unable to defrag the volume, I think its because due to the ATDATA file being so large that there is insufficient room on the disc to rearrange this file.

that cant always be entirely true though.

-Format a new disc in HiMD mode.

-Transfer 2 songs

-The file size of the ATDATA file will still be very small (actually its more or less 850kb (the system overhead) + size of music transfered)

-You could potentially have hundreds and hundreds of MB left on the disc free

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that cant always be entirely true though.

-Format a new disc in HiMD mode.

-Transfer 2 songs

-The file size of the ATDATA file will still be very small (actually its more or less 850kb (the system overhead) + size of music transfered)

-You could potentially have hundreds and hundreds of MB left on the disc free

The ATDATA file expands or contracts when you add or remove music files to / from the disk with SonicStage etc. so it's possible to store other computer files on their at the same time if there's the space that is.

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The ATDATA file expands or contracts when you add or remove music files to / from the disk with SonicStage etc. so it's possible to store other computer files on their at the same time if there's the space that is.

ok, ill bite... but if your opening the folder in windows explorer, under what you said, it should have contracted to allow for maximum space remaining. Therefore it doesnt make sense that way because it would then have all the extra space available to it

Edited by ROMBUSTERS
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i know it may not do much, but i am wondering if defraging the disc, would make anything  unreadable, i went to defrag my hard drive and decided to analyse the disc and saw it was pretty much JUST fragmented files, which is iunderstandable completely

but yes, please any info on if i would run any risk of making the disk unreadable by the player or sonic stage

Thank you-

I've tried it once, but never again. The music was not destroyed so far but due to the physics of MO-Media, it even took ages on my nearly empty Hi-MD. I tried it with the defrag utility of Win2000 and have aborted it after about 15 minutes but the drive was still acessing and acessing... It has locked my entire system until I have disconnected the USB cable. Well, it was just for testing...

kind of defragmenting a CD-RW or something. These media just isn't made for things like this.

Even if the media was fast it could only defrag the physical files itself but the tracks are all stored in this single file like some tables in a single database file or the files in a zip file. So you will have the same problems as with a database: the logical fragmentation IN the file, which can only be defragmented with a utility FOR this file. So we will have to wait until sony comes with a "Hi-MD Music defragmenting Tool" Well, chances for peace on earth seem to be higher than this biggrin.gif

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I've tried it once, but never again. The music was not destroyed so far but due to the physics of MO-Media, it even took ages on my nearly empty Hi-MD. I tried it with the defrag utility of Win2000 and have aborted it after about 15 minutes but the drive was still acessing and acessing... It has locked my entire system until I have disconnected the USB cable. Well, it was just for testing...

kind of defragmenting a CD-RW or something. These media just isn't made for things like this.

Even if the media was fast it could only defrag the physical files itself but the tracks are all stored in this single file like some tables in a single database file or the files in a zip file. So you will have the same problems as with a database: the logical fragmentation IN the file, which can only be defragmented with a utility FOR this file. So we will have to wait until sony comes with a "Hi-MD Music defragmenting Tool" Well, chances for peace on earth seem to be higher than this biggrin.gif

it already exists, its called transfering all your media to your PC, then reformatting the disc, then transfering it back - this gets rid of the laser seek time you sometimes can hear during the middle of the song (although the song should still be playing from memory at that point). This is because when you add and erase and edit things on the disc the data becomes fragmented all over. While the music is playing from the buffer the laser is seeking back and forth finding bits and pieces of the data to fill the buffer back up. If you reformat a disc (also called initializing in SonicStage) and then transfer the music back, it is placed efficiently all together on the disc (thus no seek time in the middle of the song)

however this is a real non-issue.

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