Ss 3.0 Bugs & Annoyances

[atreyu]

I mostly like SS 3.0 (and overall prefer it to 2.3), but I wanted to vent about some of its bugs & annoyances, hoping Sony's monitoring this forum. Please add your own if you've got 'em!

(I *have* done a full SS 3.0 reinstallation as per the FAQ.) I'm running Windows 2k Pro, but have seen most of this behavior on my less-used WinXP Pro laptop.

1 - (Bug) Deleting an album from an MD often deletes all the tracks in the album but leaves an empty album at the bottom of the list, which must be deleted again.

2 - (Bug) When you drag a new mp3 or wav (one not currently in SS) into a playlist with tracks in it, it shows up at the *top* of the playlist, instead of the bottom. Dragging multiple new mp3's/wav's into a playlist causes bizarre placement... tracks wind up scattered between the top & the middle.

3 - (Annoyance) In 2.3, transfers were flexible even after they'd started: if I didn't have enough space for the next album I wanted I could delete another album while the transfer was running. The deletion would complete before the remaining tracks/albums were tranferred, and the extra space would be useable immediately, so I could queue up the replacement album and walk away. In 3.0 the album isn't deleted until all the tracks are transferred, so queueing a replacement album brings up an insufficient space dialog. This really stinks when doing a huge transfer, as you must wait for the transfer to finish, or else cancel the transfer, delete the album you don't want, and requeue everything to get stuff to fit.

4 - (Bug related to #3) Deleting albums while a tranfer is in progress sometimes causes SS to hang at the end of the current album transfer. The only way to recover is to manually end the omgjbox process with Task Manager. When you restart SS & check the MD, that last album is missing.

5 - (Annoyance) Adding cover art to a CD (before you rip it) applies the art to each imported track, not just to the album itself as in 2.3. It also puts duplicate copies of the source .jpg into the album's folder... one copy for EACH song! I'd prefer to see a confirmation dialog like the one you get when you try to apply cover art to an existing album (ex. "The cover art has been applied to this disc. Would you like to apply it to every track you import from this disc?").

6 - (Bug related to #5) Deleting unwanted cover art from each track in an album reduces the size of the .oma files, but does not remove the multiple, duplicate source .jpg's from the album's folder.

7 - (Bug related to #6) Manually deleting the jpegs left over from #6 causes the next database optimization to crash SS, and causes annoying warnings the next time you back up your library. I tried replacing the jpegs with 0 byte fake jpegs, but the result was the same.

8 - (Annoyance) When setting multiple properties for a playlist, if you set the Title, Artist, Artist's Initial and Genre fields and then drag over new cover art, all the other properties are cleared and you must set them again.

9 - (Related annoyance) The Artist's Initial field in the playlist properties is not automatically filled in with the artist's Initial, no matter how many times you've entered an initial for that artist. This should only have to be set when you first add an artist.

10 - (Annoyance) When doing a mass import of audio files, SS appears to be hung (not responding to mouse events, etc.). However it is using some CPU resources, and will eventually complete the import if you leave it alone for an hour or two. There really should be a progress bar to let you know it's really doing something.

That's all I can think of for now.

Edited March 21, 2005 by atreyu

[MZ-NH1]

1 - (Bug) When you drag a new track (mp3, etc) into a playlist, it shows up at the *top* of the playlist, instead of the bottom.  Dragging multiple new tracks into a playlist seems to cause random placement... tracks wind up scattered between the top & the middle.

←

For me, if I right click the track then go, Existing Playlist, and then click the playlist, it will add the Song to the bottom of the playlist for me...

10 - (Annoyance) When doing a mass import of audio files, SS appears to be hung (not responding to mouse events, etc.). However it is using some CPU resources, and will eventually complete the import if you leave it alone for an hour or two. There really should be a progress bar to let you know it's really doing something.

When I imported music in SS 2.3 I use to get exactly the same problem, and I would have to leave my PC for 1-2 hrs before I was able to use SS, and my CPU would be down to a normal running rate...

In SS 3.0, I don’t have this problem... I do get a status bar, which also has a bar with status, and a "time left" as well. Last time I imported all my music, it took about 5 mins!

So for me, this feature has improved a lot. Don't know why you are getting that problem.

[atreyu]

For me, if I right click the track then go, Existing Playlist, and then click the playlist, it will add the Song to the bottom of the playlist for me...

Sorry, guess I didn't make myself clear. What I'm talking about is dragging an MP3 not already in SS into a playlist with tracks in it. For example, if I've got 10 new MP3's in an Explorer window, and an open, empty playlist... I can highlight the first 3 and drag them in... normal behavior... they're songs 1-3. But if I drag MP3 4 in, it'll wind up as song 1, even if it has an ID tag identifying it as track 4. And if I I then drag tracks 6-10 in, it's anybody's guess where they'll wind up in the order of things. 2.3 had behavior I consider correct... track 4 would go in the last spot, and 6-10 would be appended to the end, in order.

As for the other issue, it only happened once, when I tried importing probably a couple of thousand "unregistered" .oma files (I'd done a "complete" install of 3.0, blowing away my library, and I was trying that before resorting to a 2-day old backup restore). But I noticed another poster's having what I suppose is the same problem. I'm not sure what format you're importing in... MP3?

Edited March 21, 2005 by atreyu

[MZ-NH1]

Sorry, guess I didn't make myself clear.  What I'm talking about is dragging an MP3 not already in SS into a playlist with tracks in it.  For example, if I've got 10 new MP3's in an Explorer window, and an open, empty playlist... I can highlight the first 3 and drag them in... normal behavior... they're songs 1-3.  But if I drag MP3 4 in, it'll wind up as song 1, even if it has an ID tag identifying it as track 4.  And if I I then drag tracks 6-10 in, it's anybody's guess where they'll wind up in the order of things.  2.3 had behavior I consider correct... track 4 would go in the last spot, and 6-10 would be appended to the end, in order.

←

Ahahaha, I didn't even know you could do that!

[willykyu]

Annoyance: Still can't manage japanese or even other foreign caracters. This is really annoying when half of your cd collection infos are written in japanese. It appears correctly in the cddb infos, but turn into ????? series after importing in SS 3.0.

Big annoyance: you still can't place your files from a folder to another, just like that( or just like MP3). You have to tell SS 3.0 after selecting the tracks, where you want to put them. Unfortunatly, the created folder with the covers and all still remains in the initial forlder. It's real mess. But if you want to select a new folder to put your atrac files manually, when you perform an automatic search, SS will import the files again, but you'll lose all the cd information, and you won't be able to import them a second time with CDDB, as the files imported aren't recognized as copied from a cd anymore.

I agree that "20" copies of the cover art remaining even after deleting it from a oma file is stupid.

A lot more to say later.

(good points: you can choose whatever bitrate you want when transfering, even from Hi-SP. SS won't keep the copy of the atrac file. Unfortunatly, if you want to have a copy, you won't have any. SS keeps only the atrac copies of other formats into Atrac, like mp3 wma etc.)

Better, but not perferct.... still dreaming of a perfect Sony program...

[Michael1980]

The slider (song position) is off. Ie you can reach the end, but the song will keep going for at least another 20 seconds.

[zerodB]

I definatley think Sony would benefit from taking a good hard look at this list. We should compile a complete list of definate bugs & annoyances (that's BUGS & annoyances people, not things on our wishlist) and send it off to Sony. I'm sure they would sit up and take notice - I'm sure these problems could be rectified in a later version of SonicStage 3.

[atreyu]

A post in the Hi-MD area reminded me of another bug I've noticed:

When mono MP3s (in my case long, low-bitrate mono mp3's of talk radio programs) are added to a playlist and transferred to MD they play back at faster-than-normal speed.

I'm forced to work around the issue by using the excellent (and free) dBpowerAMP Music Converter to convert the mp3 to a mono WAV file, add the WAV to a SS playlist, then convert it to Atrac3plus 48kbps and delete the WAV file (via the converted track's properties dialog).

Edited March 23, 2005 by atreyu

[atreyu]

Just found another bug... track number data on WMA files does not transfer to SS. No matter what the track number is on a WMA it is imported to SS as track 0.

By the way, can anyone else confirm any of these bugs? Preferably on other equipment (mine is an NH-1) and/or other OS's (I primarily use SS on Win2k Pro).

Edited March 25, 2005 by atreyu

[kiryen]

Annoyance: Still can't manage japanese or even other foreign caracters. This is really annoying when half of your cd collection infos are written in japanese. It appears correctly in the cddb infos, but turn into ????? series after importing in SS 3.0.

I'm using the Japanese version of SS right now for this reason. It should be able to recognize Japanese song data, at least it works for my WMA files. For more information on the Japanese version, I made another post about it with installation instructions in the HiMD board.

Note: You'll need WinRAR (or another file decompression utility) to extract the installer files for step 3.

Hope that helps.

[atreyu]

An annoyance: when you right-click a track to send it to a playlist, there's no "browse" option to select anything other than the last few edited playlists that pop down. To add tracks to any other playlist you must open the "Create/Edit Playlist" window and manually scroll down to the playlist you want to add to.

[sxc]

With the support of playlists in the NW-HD5, and the new way that Sonicstage sorts and stores music based on its ID tags, I thought that it may have improved the way it imports m3u playlists. Unfortunately I was wrong.

Just for example you already have an mp3 file in your SonicStage library. If you then create a m3u playlist using Windows Media Player which includes this song, and then you import it to sonicStage, SS makes a duplicate entry of this song in your library. If you then transfer the playlist, it will re-transcode the mp3. So you will have 2 transcodings of the same mp3 file.

How stupid is that??

[ch1m3ra]

should have to abily to select multiple tracks,right click on them in batch and add an artist/album name for the selected tunes in bulk like in itunes(this is especially useful when converting from one format into another i.e. aac(m4a) to mp3).if only itunes would support atrac/plus/3,beautiful piece of software.

well thats my 5 pence worth!

[Seikeden]

There is this giant blue bug on my computer right now called sonicstage 3.1 .. (j/k)

ok seriously-

Sonicstage irretrievably alters any media files it indexes/imports. yes the source ones. This is great if you rely on hash checks to maintain authenticity.

The thing runs like it's on a PII, on my athlon 2600XP. I Rename one file and it mysteriously accesses the harddisk for about 20 seconds. every thing you do in it seems to take an unimaginably long time, AND carries the added bonus of making your compuiter unusable while its doing whatever its doing.

Whenever I put a file to md it makes a copy.. there's no option to delete the copy after transfer, I cannot make a new copy without deleting the old *new* copy, there's no easy way to do that effectively.

The database...ohhh the database.. :'( where's the work button damn it?

The SonicStage team is now on my hitlist. They've had enough time to fix, and only made things worse. The sooner someone makes an outlaw alternative to SS the better. I'll glady pay to get this bloated piece of DRM spyware non working useless crap off my pc.

thank you sony ..|.

Edited April 23, 2005 by Seikeden

[Syrius]

^^ Sorry if I sound like I'm defending Sony and their retrograde policies. But have you thought of making a copy of your to-be-imported file, and transferring it to MD? That way your hash checks on the original don't get messed up. I doubt that SS will alter the original in any way. Maybe changing the properties to 'Read only' could do the trick?

Just found another bug... track number data on WMA files does not transfer to SS.  No matter what the track number is on a WMA it is imported to SS as track 0.

By the way, can anyone else confirm any of these bugs?  Preferably on other equipment (mine is an NH-1) and/or other OS's (I primarily use SS on Win2k Pro).

←

I think that the only thing that SS does look at is the filename in the original track, and that's the reason why this happens.

Edited April 23, 2005 by Syrius

[Seikeden]

^^ Sorry if I sound like I'm defending Sony and their retrograde policies. But have you thought of making a copy of your to-be-imported file,  and transferring it to MD? That way your hash checks on the original don't get messed up. I doubt that SS will alter the original in any way. Maybe changing the properties to 'Read only' could do the trick?

I think that the only thing that SS does look at is the filename in the original track, and that's the reason why this happens.

←

Oh yes of course I'm doing that now.. another annoyance though and it wont save the hundreds of files I just nuetered ^^

[iyareu]

Hi there chaps,

I have an AP1 Pocket Vaio. and am using SS3.1.

I have 9000 tracks on it. When I create a playlist on the PC in SS and transfer it - SS re-transfers the tracks onto the player.

Is there a way to create a playlist than just uses the tags and doesn't re-transfer the tracks to the player?

Thanks for any help.