Trying to recover after a harddisk crash

[vincent-x]

Hello everyone,

I have used Minidisc for many years and when the NetMDs cam out I bought one. I had happily been building a nice library and everything was in the ATRAC format. I kept my music files on an external hard drive and the program was installed on the drive inside my laptop. Recently my laptop drive crashed. Having recently built a new rig I installed Sonic Stage on to it and imported the files in but it said that it could not find the required licenses to play the material. It offered to connect to the internet but afterwards it hadn’t done anything. Using a 2.5” drive to 3.5” drive converter and some recovery software I pulled the information out of ‘Documents and Settings’ in the Sony folders and tried copying these across. I still cannot play my files. You might suggest that I just need to rip my CDs again, but I’m in Japan and my CDs are in the UK and we aren’t going to be seeing each other anytime soon.

Is there anything that anybody else can possibly suggest in order to help me? I haven’t contacted Sony yet as I think that I will either get no support whatsoever or they will tell me that I need to rip my CDs again.

If anyone can even offer the slightest suggest as to what I can do please reply, I am really getting to the end of my tether on this and I have even been tempted to go P2P to get MP3s of the CDs I own.

Thanks everyone,

Vincent-x

[dex Otaku]

Sorry to disappoint you, but what you're experiencing is one of the side-effects of DRM - it doing its job.

The music you ripped from your own CDs was keyed to the specific installation of SS that you were using. Trying to simply move them, without using the SS backup tool, to another installation of SS can't work because SS can tell the music originated somewhere else.

I'm not aware of any way for you to transfer the liscenses without having the original installation of SS around to make a transferable backup from.

[aaronzhang]

i'm experiencing a similar problem. i made some recordings with the mz-nh700 and transfered the openmg files to my harddisk. but my old windows crashed and i had to reinstall it. after that i found that i could play the recording (stored in drive d). my sonystage said it needed licenses and tried to download but couldn't found any and then refused to play the recordings. i couldn't upload the recordings back to my md either.

i guess i should have converted the recording to wav files before i reinstalled my system. the licenses must have been stored in the system drive.

anyone knows if i could play the recordings or upload them to my md again? they are very important to me.

thanks!

[dex Otaku]

Since the files you have are encrypted to a key you no longer have, they're basically useless. Liscenses lost = files useless, unless of course you happen to have reverse-engineered Sony's DRM.

If you bug Sony enough they might come up with some kind of solution for you, and hopefully everyone else. This is the only suggestion I can make, other than to, in the future:

* update to SS 3.3 and rip your new stuff without DRM [the option is there]

* make backups using the SS backup tool

* convert to WAV as soon as you've uploaded

Side-note: if you bought music from Connect online, Sony can re-establish those liscenses for you.