Should I uninstall & reinstall SS?

[lipstickpistol]

Hi,

I have all my music on MDs, no worries there, but there's stuff I want to re-transfer onto SS that's been on there before and has since been erased. Obviously, this would mean the music would be deleted from the disk I was transferring from - this happened to me yesterday with a few tracks and I was NOT a happy bunny!

Anyway, like I said, I do have the music in question on another MD. I want to transfer it into my SS library again so I can manage it.

So.......is it best if I uninstall my SS 2.0 and install a newer version? Will I then be able to transfer it all o there again and not lose the tracks off the MD disk?

And if it's all on MD disks anyway, do I still need to back it all up? Surely it's already backed up in a way, on the MDs?

Thanks for this site, it's most comforting!

[The Low Volta]

Am I correct assuming you are talking about your own recordings that you have already uploaded to PC before, then erased and you now want them on PC again?

if so... sorry, only through realtime 'rerecording' either digitally by playing through SS and recording with TotalRecorder or analoguely by connecting headphone out on MD to line in on PC and recording with Audacity (or something alike)

later versions of SS (3.2 and 3.3) do allow multiple uploads of your own recordings, but not of tracks previously uploaded with a lower version.

So, to answer your last question: no keeping them on MD only isn't a safe way of keeping backups. Always convert precious recordings to wav or a lossless compression (flac, wma-lossless, wavpack...) and keep it somewhere safe (DVD-R, CDR,...)

[A440]

Just to rephrase and expand the Low Volta's explanation a little:

Definitely upgrade SonicStage from 2.0 to 3.3. It's more stable and it screws up transfers far less often, if at all. Most important, it eliminates a crucial restriction: you can upload analogue recordings you have made (via Line-In or Mic-In) as many times as you want--perhaps on the assumption that they are either yours or so low quality it doesn't matter.

Versions 3.1 and earlier of SonicStage only allowed you to upload your own recordings once--and then vindictively erased them completely if you tried to do it again.

Beware: if you used past versions to upload, then the tracks are tagged and you can't upload again, no matter what version of SonicStage you are using now.

But I don't know if you are talking about music you made/recorded or music from CDs that you transferred to MD's.

If something started on your hard drive and was transferred onto MD, then was erased from your hard drive, you can't upload it back to your hard drive. They used to call it checking out, but it's the wrong analogy. It's not like a library book that actually moves from one place to another: it's making a portable copy of what was on your hard drive. Checking back in just removes it from the MD--it doesn't really move it back.

That direction--from MD to hard drive--is disabled because Sony is worried that you will go through that ridiculously involved process to copy music from computer to computer. (At the same time all their computers come with CD burners--go figure.)

I don't know whether you can upload an analogue recording to different copies of Sonic Stage 3.2/3.3 installed on different computers. Has anyone tried (risked) this?

As for archiving, MDs (the discs themselves) are pretty sturdy. But if your unit gives out and Sony stops making them, you're going to be left with some unplayable material. As Volta said, it's best to archive your recordings in a format that's more widely compatible. With anything that started on MD but has been uploaded before, you'd have to do that as a realtime recording--see the TotalRecorder method here:

http://forums.minidisc.org/index.php?showtopic=6330