Sonic stage problem or problem with my music?

[Sulamani]

After all these months getting my MD's working again. More problems once again, but this time it seems to be Sonic Stage or there are problems with my tracks. I have reinstalled Sonic Stage 2.0 after removing the 4.3 version because no other versions seems to work for on this computer. Everything was fine importing tracks to the Sonic Stage library. When I transfer the tracks to the MD, everything was fine, converted without errors and transferred successfully. After finishing transferring, here is when the problem starts. Half of the tracks played fine but the other half sounded a but weird. It sounded like a DJ scratching vinyl, constantly squeaking randomly and the track speeds up and slows down.

Has anyone encountered this weird problem?

Is there any solution solving this? These tracks are the same tracks that I had on the Disc before and worked perfectly before I erased the Disc and started putting the tracks into the Disc all over again.

[Avrin]

Downgrading SonicStage always leads to problems. The newer version is not fully removed, leaving some libraries and/or drivers behind, and the older version is unable to work correctly.

Remove the older version, OpenMG and everything related, and then install SonicStage 4.3 "Ultimate" (found in the Software Updates section of the forums). If the problem persists after that, other things need to be checked, such as system clock source (some AMD processor based systems require that it be set to PM timer instead of the CPU).

[Sulamani]

Thanks Avrin for the SonicStage 4.3 "Ultimate"

But some tracks are not transferring to the MD though. I think its the problem with the bitrate, some tracks reads 320/k in properties. But when I go into the file info for that track in SonicStage the bitrate is something like 177/k, 189/k looks like very irregular form. Weird! I think I need to convert them into the regular bitrate e.g 128/k, 256/k etc. Is there any good free license software to batch converts? Not one of those free trial software that locks itself after XX converts or XX days unless you pay.

Thanks : )

[darrencouch]

http://lame.sourceforge.net/

also for a nice frontend for windows:

http://www.foobar2000.org/

All will need a slight learning curve, but will get your music at the rate you would like it. Now, this is only for anything OTHER than ATRAC, mind you.

[Avrin]

This looks like a problem with variable bitrate MP3s (these always show up with strange bitrates). As long as the bitrate varies within supported limits (32-320 kbits for MP3) it won't cause any problems. But some encoders go beyond these limits, dropping below 32 kbit/s for very simple parts and exceeding 320 kbit/s for complex stuff. SonicStage may or may not have problems playing/transferring such files. And such files may or may not play on a particular device. It's quite unpredictable.

Actually, even some constant bitrate files may sometimes have non-standard (i.e., out of the 32-320 kbit/s band) blocks at the very beginning and cause problems.

Edited December 9, 2009 by Avrin

[Sulamani]

Thanks everyone for helping me out : )

I started testing WAV files on Sonic Stage. WAV files seems to be fine but transfer is slow compared to mp3's. Also WAV takes a lot of space compared to mp3's.