storyteller Posted April 15, 2005 Report Share Posted April 15, 2005 Hi--forgive me if I'm asking something that's already answered or is obvious--I searched the forums but couldn't find anything.My new HiMD (RH910) is working BEAUTIFULLY as a data storage drive, as an MP3 player, everything. I'm new to the minidisc format and had worries but so far it's great.One problem has come up, though. I downloaded some large (30 minutes/12mb) .mp3 files from an internet radio station: they play perfectly through Windows Media Player, and play in Sonic Stage, and transfer without error to the HiMD unit and show up on the playlist...but when I go to play them on the HiMD, it says "CANNOT PLAY" It's never had a problem with any other mp3s, so I'm not sure what's happening or how to fix it. Is there a conversion step because these mp3s were originally meant to be streaming? (I'm just guessing here).Thanks for any help you can offer!GregP.S. What's the best free stream capture program, to convert streaming audio to mp3s? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Christopher Posted April 15, 2005 Report Share Posted April 15, 2005 Welcome to the forums!It is known that Sonicstage has problems digesting certain *.mp3's and can't facilitate them at all. What's the bitrate of these tracks? Does it happen for all of your mp3's, or just these? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
streaml1ne Posted April 15, 2005 Report Share Posted April 15, 2005 Hi--forgive me if I'm asking something that's already answered or is obvious--I searched the forums but couldn't find anything.My new HiMD (RH910) is working BEAUTIFULLY as a data storage drive, as an MP3 player, everything. I'm new to the minidisc format and had worries but so far it's great.One problem has come up, though. I downloaded some large (30 minutes/12mb) .mp3 files from an internet radio station: they play perfectly through Windows Media Player, and play in Sonic Stage, and transfer without error to the HiMD unit and show up on the playlist...but when I go to play them on the HiMD, it says "CANNOT PLAY" It's never had a problem with any other mp3s, so I'm not sure what's happening or how to fix it. Is there a conversion step because these mp3s were originally meant to be streaming? (I'm just guessing here).Thanks for any help you can offer!GregP.S. What's the best free stream capture program, to convert streaming audio to mp3s?←What sample rate are they at? Lower bitrate mp3's generally use lower sample rates which the player doesn't like. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
storyteller Posted April 15, 2005 Author Report Share Posted April 15, 2005 Thanks for the replies! It hadn't occurred to me to check the bitrate...under File Properties it says Audio Bit Rate 48kbps, and under Audio Sample Rate 22kHz. Are these in the problematic range? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
A440 Posted April 16, 2005 Report Share Posted April 16, 2005 Audio Bit Rate 48kbps, and under Audio Sample Rate 22kHz. ←Those low bitrates often trip up SS. You could try using dbpoweramp (www.dbpoweramp.com) to convert them to 128 kbps mp3s and then loading those via Sonic Stage. The problem is that a second conversion is going to lower the quality further, so try one before you convert them all. If you want a free stream recorder, you can get the freeware version of Stepvoice on this page.http://stepvoice.com/download.htmlMake sure when you run it that you change the default bitrate to something higher than 48kbps. TotalRecorder captures streams well and it's only $11.95. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
me Posted April 16, 2005 Report Share Posted April 16, 2005 I think you could change the sample rate to 44.1KHz, it might like that better. 128Kbps would make the file twice and a bit as big. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
storyteller Posted April 16, 2005 Author Report Share Posted April 16, 2005 I've got it! It works! Thanks for all your help. The best results came from converting the files to 128kbps mp3s through dbpoweramp (great program! Though what do I do when the 30 days' free trial of the mp3 encoder is up? Pay? Unthinkable! ) . The Stepvoice worked but it was real-time, which was a pain since these are 30-minute plus programs.Interestingly, I tried converting to ATRAC as well, and ran into the following problems:1) The conversion produced poorer quality audio (lots of that silvery hissing/buzzing to the sound, don't know what to call it) even at 132kbps ATRAC3 (should I have used ATRACplus? what's the difference?)2) When I first tried to use the converter tool that came with my HiMD, it refused to change the files to ATRAC because it said it wasn't necessary. I thought this was a bit ironic, that I couldn't convince Sonic Stage to put something into ATRAC, given the complaints in these forums about not having any other option...!3) When I downloaded the mp3 converter file from Sony's website, it installed fine but insisted that I had to have SonicStage greater than 2.1 installed--so I had to reinstall SonicStage for it to recognize it. Now everything seems to be working fine, and the HiMD continues to seem a great investment. Outside of recording, my main use for it is actually these radio broadcasts--I'm trying to keep at least my passive fluency in Indonesian and French up by listening to these broadcasts while walking back and forth to work. So...thanks!!! What a fantastic community this is in support of the product--Greg Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bug80 Posted April 16, 2005 Report Share Posted April 16, 2005 I've got it! It works! Thanks for all your help. The best results came from converting the files to 128kbps mp3s through dbpoweramp (great program! Though what do I do when the 30 days' free trial of the mp3 encoder is up? Pay? Unthinkable! ) .First of all, I recommend that you convert the files from MP3 to WAV to ATRAC instead of MP3 to MP3 to ATRAC. Every "lossy to lossy" conversion (called transcoding) will give you quality loss.Second, I recommend foobar 2000 for all your conversions. It needs some getting used to, but it's a great audio player too. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Syrius Posted April 16, 2005 Report Share Posted April 16, 2005 Or even the free version of Musicmatch Jukebox will convert Wav to MP3 and vice versa. go to www.oldversion.com and download ver 7.5 And it's pretty easy to use. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
A440 Posted April 17, 2005 Report Share Posted April 17, 2005 Agreed that MP3--.WAV--ATRAC would be best, but a 30-minute .wav file is going to take a lot of hard-drive space, like around 300 MB. Storyteller, if you do have hard-drive space aplenty, use .wav instead of .mp3, or higher-bitrate mp3 (256 kbps).And you are much better off with SS 2.3 or 3.0 than with 2.1, so Sony actually did you a favor. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
storyteller Posted April 17, 2005 Author Report Share Posted April 17, 2005 Actually, the odd thing is I already had 3.0 installed (it's what the rh910 shipped with)...the only thing that now seems different is that the right-click context menu now offers "convert format" as an option--! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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