Simple Burner for NW-A3000

[Oliveraba]

Hi, I just bought a black NW-A3000, 1st impressions are good. I've had a D-NE900 and an MZ-NH900 both of which I really enjoyed using. The thing that has always been a problem is of course the software. Sonicstage can be a pain at times but I've learnt to live with it (to my surprise 1500 songs and no crashes!), I haven't even installed the CONNECT that came with my NW-A3000 because from what I've been reading in these forums, it's awful

I was just wondering whether there is an alternative to simple burner for the NW-A3000. I know I can rip the music to my library or use Windows Media Player to convert the music. But I would just like to import the music straight to the NW-A3000 so I can leave the player transferring, rather than letting it rip the music, then copying the music and going through the hassle of deleting the files.

Any help would be appreciated,

Thanks in Advance

[maggior]

What I do is rip CDs to wave file using EAC into separate directories. Be sure to include the track number as the first 2 characters of the track name. You can use whatever ripping program you like - as long as it creates WAV files, not mp3.

When you have completed ripping all of the CDs you want, open up Sonic Stage. Then, drag each directory into SS from Windows Explorer. Each drag/drop operation you do will translate to another album. If you set SS up to show albums in imported order, you will see the albums up top as they are created.

You need to do the drag/dropping one at a time because each drag/drop will create an album with no name. If you do a bunch of them, you will lose track of which is which. After you have imported an album, right click on it and click properties. From there, you can title the album, set the genre, artist, etc. What you specify here will be applied to all tracks that make up the album.

After you have done this for all of your albums, switch your view to show all tracks (as opposed to albums). At the bottom of the list, you will see the wave files you have imported. Select all of them and right click. You will see a option to convert format. Choose this and pick whichever bit rate you want. Be sure that the box about protection is unchecked - you don't want to add DRM to your files.

After this is done, switch back to album view. Select all of the albums that you created and delete them (trust me on this...:-). When you delete them, be sure that the "delete music files" box is NOT checked. Once this is complete, go back to Windows Explorer and find the ATRAC files you created in the conversion in the directory that you have configured SS to put the "optimized files". The files in this directory will have an omg extension. Select all of the files that you converted and drag them into SS.

The purpose of deleting the albums in SS and reimporting the omg files is to easily remove the reference to the wave files from the SS database. The alternative is to click on the properties of each track and remove the reference to the wave file. This is a long and painful process.

You will see your albums created again. Double check each album to ensure the track ordering is correct. For some reason, this gets jumbled occasionally.

At this point, you can delete the WAV files you created when you ripped the CDs.

This sounds complicated, but it's easy once you get the hang of it. The hard part was figuring this procedure out! I've been using this method for months now and it has served me well. I posted this procedure in the minidisc forum and people have had good luck with it. (It was in that discussion thread that somebody made the suggestion about removing the albums and importing the OMG files back.) What I like about it is it allows you to encode in a batch mode rather than rip, encode, rip, encode, etc. Plus you can deal with files you obtain through another means than ripping a CD (e.g. FLAC files from bit torrent, an FTP site, etc.).

I hope this helps. Send any questions you might have my way and I will try to answer them.

Cheers!

Rich

BTW, even though I am ripping outside of SS, I still get gapless playback on my ATRAC files.

Edited May 8, 2006 by maggior

[Beethovenian]

If I understood correctly, what you want is to rip your CDs directly to the player, without leaving copies in the PC. I don't think that's possible and, to be honest, even desirable. It's always better to have some backup.

As an alternative to maggior's method, I'd suggest ripping your CDs to WMA Lossless in Windows Media Player. It's a reasonably fast ripper, and it will add tag information already during ripping. You can then just import your files into SonicStage and select an Atrac bitrate for transfer. Since the NW-A3000 doesn't support WMA Lossless, all files will be converted during transfer (and theoretically no copies of the Atrac files will remain in your PC).

[maggior]

If I understood correctly, what you want is to rip your CDs directly to the player, without leaving copies in the PC. I don't think that's possible and, to be honest, even desirable. It's always better to have some backup.

As an alternative to maggior's method, I'd suggest ripping your CDs to WMA Lossless in Windows Media Player. It's a reasonably fast ripper, and it will add tag information already during ripping. You can then just import your files into SonicStage and select an Atrac bitrate for transfer. Since the NW-A3000 doesn't support WMA Lossless, all files will be converted during transfer (and theoretically no copies of the Atrac files will remain in your PC).

I misunderstood the question. I forgot Simple Burner for the MD recorders would copy the CD directly to the MD. But the answer to his original question is no, you can't rip directly to the net walkman (to my knowledge anyway).

Regarding the WMA method - it isn't advisable if you care about gapless playback. I had some lossless WMA files that were tagged that I imported into SS and converted to ATRAC. It was great that the tags were automatically imported, but the resulting files had gaps between the tracks. For me, that was a deal killer. I took those same WMA files, converted them to wave, and then imported and converted them. The result was no gaps. Must be a bug in SS decoding routines for WMA.

So, if you are concerned about gapless playback, best to avoid the WMA method.

Cheers,

Rich

[Beethovenian]

Yes, that's true. WMA Lossless files don't produce gapless copies. Actually, for me WAV files were also non-gapless after transcoding. Only CDs directly imported in SonicStage. Don't know why it works like that for me and not for you. But if one doesn't have many gapless albums, the WMA Lossless method can be easier to deal with.

[Oliveraba]

Thanks for the advice Rich and Beethovenian, I have tried both methods, but I don't really have room on my hard-drive for back-ups, I've only got a 40GB one and there's already 25GB of music on it. I gave both methods a shot and to be honest they both worked without problems, but they were a little time consuming. My PC just isn't up to doing this sort of stuff. Transcoding straight to sonicstage seems like the way to go, gapless playback is a nice bonus as I like listening to full albums on my player.

Thanks for all the in depth advice and methods for transfer, I'm sure people with a better spec PC will find these really useful, for me, back to sonicstage .