More Sonic Stage backup problems

[RED SHIFT1]

All this backup problems are getting to me...after running the conversion tool, everything I imported prior to that is gone. I get the "file not found". I know where the files are: on the external drive. I don't think the program is looking there. It saves files to it tho. Can I fix this?

[bobt]

All this backup problems are getting to me...after running the conversion tool, everything I imported prior to that is gone. I get the "file not found". I know where the files are: on the external drive. I don't think the program is looking there. It saves files to it tho. Can I fix this?

AFAIK sonicstage needs to see the files as drive C:, I run two hard drives on my puter, if I poin SS to the other drive, , no files found, if I boot into the other drive, everything is there. I think the only way around that is to have your music originally saved to your extra drive, not put there later.

Good luck

Bob

[RED SHIFT1]

AFAIK sonicstage needs to see the files as drive C:, I run two hard drives on my puter, if I poin SS to the other drive, , no files found, if I boot into the other drive, everything is there. I think the only way around that is to have your music originally saved to your extra drive, not put there later.

Good luck

Bob

Can you explain that? A few weeks ago I began running out of room on the C drive. A poster told me how to have the software import the cds to the external hard drive.

[RED SHIFT1]

Well, I finally reached the end with SS 4.3. The last 3 days have been real ugly. My problems seems to have started when I used the options menu to have SS save future cd imports on an external drive. It seemed to work fine...for awhile. Then everything started to fall apart:

(1) After running the backuptool a lot of files just vanished. I was told that the backup tool does not really backup anything. They were right.

(2) I discovered that I could use the File import menu to reimport files from the external drive...but they don't seem to last long. By 8AM, the ones I had done this with yesterday once again would not play..."file not found".

I re-imported everything from the F drive and after running the conversion tool I started getting the dreaded message again.

It seems that the origial decision to have the SS program use the external drive (cause I ran out of room on the C drive) was a mistake. I have now just simply deleted everything I have imported..both on the C and F drives, except for a few dozen that I need to keep on the C drive because of the playlists I have made up. I will restart all this again possibly next week with Windows Media Player 11. I am researching the possibilites with it.

I will still keep SS software on the PC so I can use the Simple Burner program.

[sfbp]

If you want to use MD, you really don't have a lot of choice. If you need only to play back some ATRAC files, there are other ways (conversion) and other devices (Flash memory) that will do the job for you.

External drive is not a problem. You must go into all the options of the program and make everything you can point there. I suspect you have put one setting to the external drive but others are still pointing to C and whenever it's full, you are in crash-land.

However if the external drive is on USB and you are trying to transfer from it to MD, it's possible you have some timing problems. Can your external drive be reconfigured to use SATA (or firewire), or at the very least have its own USB controller?

[RED SHIFT1]

I think maybe I will try this whole over again and use the F drive from the start. After downloading several other music cataloging programs, none are as simple as SS. Windows Media Player 11 comes close, but after a few trial runs I found something rather strange:

(1) I have a lot of recordable cds where I recorded two lps, tapes, etc., by two different bands. Example:

Tracks 1-12 Kingsmen "The Game Of Life"

Tracks 13-23 Gold City "Walk On"

Here are two lps by two entirely different bands on one cd. I simply want to import them in WMP 11 seperately, so that when I click My Library they come up as two seperate artists and albums. If I just had one group on the cd, say the Kingsmen, it would be easy: stick the cd in, hit rip, type in artist, etc. And then the cd would come up on My Library:

Kingsmen

"Game Of Life"

And then the tracks would be listed.

As it is now, I cannot seem to get WMP 11 to seperate two artists that are on one disc. I put in the disc, go to the rip page, and just check the Kingsmen tracks, I thought I could seperate the two that...but it don't work. The software rips ALL of them (Gold City as well) and then labels ALL of them as the Kingsmen under the Game Of Life album. That is no good! I need to be able to make each lp an individual entry in the My Library.

[sfbp]

In case you haven't done this (pulled the plug), I will tell you about one of the "quirks" of SonicStage.

At times I have noticed that perfectly valid files (unencrypted files, I don't even consider the encrypted ones, for all I know they may be no problem) such as .WAV or .OMA somehow get marked in the SonicStage database as untransferable. I have no clue why. They can always be played, but the act of transferring causes them to fail in (IIRC) roughly the manner you describe.

The solution for a single track (or even several tracks from the same album) is extremely simple, especially if this doesn't mean destroying the album to which it belongs. Delete the tracks (from the Database, not from the Hard disk) you care about and re-import (select the Files option rather than the Folders option) them back. This is pretty trivial for WAV files so much so that I usually end up putting all my WAV files in a separate folder nothing to do with SonicStage (I call it :sound:), so they can't get deleted by mistake.

For lots and lots of tracks, it is a bit more complicated. Once you have proved to your own satisfaction that you can "fix" one, then you may find that it helps to be very organised, quite a military campaign in fact. I generally leave one song as a placeholder (you can tell I have done this before). Then it's quite easy to go to the newly-imported tracks and rename the Album and Artist, whereupon the tracks should pop back to where you had them if you typed everything correctly (including the state of the "compilation" checkbox). You can do the last track after that.

If they are imports (.oma or .OMA) you need to be a little more careful, and decrypt your entire database first, just to be sure. If you haven't ever done this, you should. It really helps to turn on the File Path in the details view (rightclick column heads in SS) so you can see what files it is working with. And to have Sonic Stage automatically rename files when you edit the title of a song. Of course THAT doesn't work when you move from one disk to another, so it really takes a delete and re-add no matter what. There's nothing intrinsically locking the files to a single drive letter, or even a single machine. You will find you can add OMA files (but not oma files lol) from another machine if you have a home network.

The other thing to try is to delete ALL non-critical files from ..\SonicStage\...\Optimized Files (or wherever you have it putting them). However it may be this action that effectively killed your efforts to transfer. What I have seen is that converted files from a previous transfer somehow mess up the poor thing which gets its k******s in a twist. In which case you might imagine (I don't have proof unfortunately) that the procedure above might fix it. By the time I am forced to do it, the Optimized Files are always long gone. But if they got deleted from the disk but not from the database that might be the problem. SS thinks that it can find an already converted file, but you have deleted or moved it.

Best to turn off that option that allows the converted files to be kept around, for future incidents. It may be sometimes there are 3 or more files that the software "knows" about as converted already, and these extra files somehow gum up the works. You can see this by looking at the properties of the track and looking at the File Info section, where you will see whether there are multiple files associated with the track. You get the third copy as soon as you try 2 different bitrates for the same track, for example.

Note: changing the database location may have weird effects on the location of "Optimized files" and where SonicStage wants to put them.

I'm sorry if this (long and rambling post) is not clear. They tried to design something for fast re-transfer (I can imagine management standing over them and saying "just cache the files") and didn't track the second or third copies properly.

(from another thread, you never did tell us what the model numbers in the store were!)

Stephen

[RED SHIFT1]

Well, I decided to give SS another chance so I imported 10 cds and then ran the conversion tool as described by another poster. This seems to be what is causing my problem. Before I ran the tool, every cd was playable from the Library page. After the tool conversion "file not found" on all 10. I don't understand why the software can't find the files, because from the start I used the Options to put the files on the external drive. It does not appear to be looking at the F drive after the conversion; before it was doing fine!

I have learned that I can use the Import Music Files to solve this...kinda. I go to the F drive (where SS imported all the cds originally, before I ran the conversion tool) find the folder with the cd I want to play, and select all the files therein. SS imports the files back into the Library under the correct folder. However, now I have two copies of every track: one that will play and another that gives me the "file not found" thing. So I delete the latter and leave the former. I thought "problem solved!" But that would mean everytime I ran the conversion tool, I would have to reimport the files again on every cd!

I think the basic problem here is that before conversion, SS reads the files and plays off the F drive; after conversion, it is confused for some some reason and does not read the F drive. So, how do I keep SS reading the external drive after the conversion?

[sfbp]

Very simple, if you are only importing CD's don't bother to run the conversion tool.

Alternatively, import to AAL (which is what I do) and avoid all the hassle, since this is an unencrypted format.

Yeah, the software assumes they are on the same drive? IF you put optimized files on the external drive (it's an O(ption under Tools I think) they will at least be somewhere near each other.

[RED SHIFT1]

I guess that is simple enough; the reason I have been doing it is becuase another poster informed that running the backup tool is useless. Converting the files makes them usuable to all SS versions, instead of just 4.3

By the way, I posted the Model of the md player I saw at wally world on the other post by me. Thanks.

[sfbp]

I guess that is simple enough; the reason I have been doing it is becuase another poster informed that running the backup tool is useless. Converting the files makes them usuable to all SS versions, instead of just 4.3

By the way, I posted the Model of the md player I saw at wally world on the other post by me. Thanks.

Oh, for Wally World! (If you don't know my favourite bad humour movie you won't understand this comment)

The problem is saving backups of "real" (originally made on MD) recordings... I don't count CD's as they can always be regenerated if you owned the CD to start with. Yes, the so-called backup tool is useless

Sony didn't want anyone to back up their CD rips, really. Or give them a way to reproduce them and share them. So it's not surprising they didn't try very hard to do that. I don't even blame them for this given their ownership of Sony Music. But AAL (included with 4.x SS) does a nice job IMO, I am sure many here would send you off in the direction of some freeware, but there's no particular need as long as you can get the SonicStage contraption installed on your PC.

[sfbp]

Addendum (possibly to the wrong post), I had been contending that, with encryption removed, we can do whatever we like with ATRAC files.

Here's an example (that I just did).

Step 1: record a bunch of music at LP2 (about 7 or 8 MD's).

Step 2: upload it using MZ-RH1 to PC

Step 3: decrypt it using File Conversion Tool to remove the copy protection

Step 4: download these files onto a single 1GB HiMD, "as is", no change in format.

Step 5: Upload all of what is on the 1GB disk onto a completely different computer.

All works famously, with no loss in quality after the initial encoding.

That's flexible enough for me to begin archiving LP2 disks into HiMD.

Stephen

[Avrin]

1 Gb Hi-MD discs are less reliable than good old 80-minute ones. I've already had two FORMAT ERRORs on those.

[sfbp]

1 Gb Hi-MD discs are less reliable than good old 80-minute ones. I've already had two FORMAT ERRORs on those.

As long as I stick to Sony, I haven't had a single error on 80m - but non-Sony 80m seem to pop up with problems once in a while depending on the player/deck. However I have never seen a 1GB go bad, so far.

"You don't get something for nothing" - I figured that there might be a price in the end for using HiMD because the media are storing information more densely. However the only time I ever saw errors with 1GB it could be attributed to "iffy" power via USB on the player when connected to PC.

The reason I like the 1GB HiMD's is that you can put a wide range of long musical items (e.g. very long operas) without changing disks. This works out to be a ratio of about storage space of 6 to 1 between 1GB and 80m. Very convenient, both for listening on the road, and also for moving music around (now I discovered how). Sure, a network is nice, but one doesn't always have that option.