why the missed bits ?

[scarrabri]

Hi i have managed to get sonicstage working using vista 32bit and most songs i record have done so very well,and sound real good,but others not so good and there are bits of the song missing,altho the orginal which i recorded from was ok ,i was wondering should i be turning virus checkers and any thing else that might interfeer with the recording off,because it seems like some thing may be kicking in at the same time i was recording, best wishes Brian ps i used the mz-n505 to record on too, and the songs i used i downloaded , my computer is pretty quick and coped very well with sonar recording studio

[Arr-Nine-Hundred]

Hi i have managed to get sonicstage working using vista 32bit and most songs i record have done so very well,and sound real good,but others not so good and there are bits of the song missing,altho the orginal which i recorded from was ok ,i was wondering should i be turning virus checkers and any thing else that might interfeer with the recording off,because it seems like some thing may be kicking in at the same time i was recording,

There could be all sorts of reasons for this but a good virus checker will have something like "silent/gaming mode" or similar. I use Avast! Free and it is has such an option, not sure about AVG Free.

I think SonicStage is more CPU-bound than IO-bound (virus checkers tend to be the opposite) so I would fire up Task Manager while transferring and observe the CPU resource graph. If it peaks at or near 100% then the encoding process *might* be a cause of the gaps.

I record directly from PC to MD via digital optical and get gaps occaisonally. Annoying. I have not got to the bottom of it yet. I use Foobar2000 to stream my music from a LAN Samba share with the buffer set to maximum. Might be network latency in my case.

[scarrabri]

There could be all sorts of reasons for this but a good virus checker will have something like "silent/gaming mode" or similar. I use Avast! Free and it is has such an option, not sure about AVG Free.

I think SonicStage is more CPU-bound than IO-bound (virus checkers tend to be the opposite) so I would fire up Task Manager while transferring and observe the CPU resource graph. If it peaks at or near 100% then the encoding process *might* be a cause of the gaps.

I record directly from PC to MD via digital optical and get gaps occaisonally. Annoying. I have not got to the bottom of it yet. I use Foobar2000 to stream my music from a LAN Samba share with the buffer set to maximum. Might be network latency in my case.

Hi Arr nine hundread checked what the cpu was doing and that gave out a very low reading so i think that is ok, i have been using a usb cable from my computer to the minidisc player using sonicstage, and i was getting at least 5 songs out of twenty missing bits,so now i have connected a optical cable and have the tunes coming from windows media player i have a new disc and recorded 20 songs ,the first two songs have bits missing the third seems fine,and the rest i am going to listen to latter,i think it may be my mz-n505, thanks for your help,best wishes Brian

[md user]

Previously, I have noticed 'glitches' in my realtime recordings onto SP-deck, when playing from PC into digital out.

Identified as cpu-scheduling. (Doesn't have to be overloaded to do this.) Some programs demand full cpu attention momentarily irrespective of others, for example usb-polling, I think.

In Linux this can be erradicated by defining niceness at -19. Don't know about Windows ... stopped using it at win98. Presumabely all Windows OS's on and after Vista can be prioritised (NT-based)?

Nevertheless, I wouldn't predict that this was the cause for genuine usb-uploading (non-realtime) ...

Hope it helps.

2cents' worth.

Regards,

mdmad.

[sfbp]

Hi Arr nine hundread checked what the cpu was doing and that gave out a very low reading so i think that is ok, i have been using a usb cable from my computer to the minidisc player using sonicstage, and i was getting at least 5 songs out of twenty missing bits,so now i have connected a optical cable and have the tunes coming from windows media player i have a new disc and recorded 20 songs ,the first two songs have bits missing the third seems fine,and the rest i am going to listen to latter,i think it may be my mz-n505, thanks for your help,best wishes Brian

FWIW my RH910 does that. I am stuck because I need a calibrated 1.2 V power supply to calibrate the unit properly. It's the only unit that does so that I possess (I hope!) and it seems to do just the same as you. The BIG difference is that because of the checksums in HiMD, the whole DISK often goes bad very quickly. Interestingly I have had maximum trouble with 1GB HiMD disks, but it sounds eerily like what you are going through.

I suspect the power circuits that move the head.

[Azureal]

Are the gaps in the sound on the MD recording as well as the saved tracks in SS? i.e. If you play the tracks with the issues on the PC via SS, do you hear the same glitches?

I recall having issues way back in the early days of NetMD. I would use another common MD encoding tool called SimpleBurner which rips directly from CD -> HD temp file -> MD at LP2 or LP4. I would commonly use LP2 at the time and I recall having several disks which had drop outs in the sound, missing music if you will. I attributed it to CPU utilization issues. I was doing other things on the machine during encoding which disrupted the process, just as mdmad states. Re-encoding corrected the issue along with leaving the machine alone while it performed the encoding.

In your case, you an listen to the saved version of the tracks to rule out the encoding step. Perhaps it is related to the actual transfer or recording process onto the MD as Stephen suggests.

[scarrabri]

Are the gaps in the sound on the MD recording as well as the saved tracks in SS? i.e. If you play the tracks with the issues on the PC via SS, do you hear the same glitches?

I recall having issues way back in the early days of NetMD. I would use another common MD encoding tool called SimpleBurner which rips directly from CD -> HD temp file -> MD at LP2 or LP4. I would commonly use LP2 at the time and I recall having several disks which had drop outs in the sound, missing music if you will. I attributed it to CPU utilization issues. I was doing other things on the machine during encoding which disrupted the process, just as mdmad states. Re-encoding corrected the issue along with leaving the machine alone while it performed the encoding.

In your case, you an listen to the saved version of the tracks to rule out the encoding step. Perhaps it is related to the actual transfer or recording process onto the MD as Stephen suggests.

Hi thankyou to everyone for there help, i have looked at everything you kind folk have said, and it would appear that the orginal downloads were fine, the cpu didnt seem to strugle,and i made sure i was doing nothing to interupt the transfer, but it does seem to take a while to do, my cpu is E6850 DUO a conro 3.00GHz which is pretty quick i have 4 gig memory , my motherboard is the Gigabyte EP45-UD3LR anyways to carry on i recorded the same songs again on a different minidisc and it did the same again,missing bits lol so i then recorded to different songs, and low and behold the first two songs only again had missing bits lol, it appears that which ever two songs i record first the result is always the same,lol missin bits ,i think the mz-n505 must be faulty ,or if any of you kind folk have a idea they would be most welcome,best wishes Brian

[sfbp]

Nope. (he said confidently). I have seen weird stuff with multiple processor CPU's. Especially when things are dependent on a crummy timing loop to poll devices on USB (there's no other way) as in this case. I have seen something similar trying to burn movies onto DVD with a multicore CPU. Turned out I needed an update from Nero, probably because they hadn't ever tried the original with > 1 processor. In Sony's case you aren't going to get one.

If you have access to another machine, I would try that. One LESS powerful.

[scarrabri]

Well now i am confused, lol i nearly gave up, i had tryed optical and usb recording,with still the same results,missed bits lol, so i took another look at what i was asking the md zn-n505 to record ,it turned out it was acepting some songs and not otheres in yet they were all mp3,so i took 20 of the same songs including the ones that gave me missing bits and put them throu sony sound forge ,i told it i wanted atrac 3 at 352 kbps,44,100 hz,stereo and to my amazement 20 songs were recorded into the md zn-n505 and when i played them back they were all perfect,well not just perfect but they sounded better than my fostex mt8 multitracker used to sound, oh am i pleased, i thank you all for your input, even now i dont understand why it now works lol best wishes Brian lol i hope it keeps working

[scarrabri]

wow i have recorded two more minidiscs by running all my mp3 collection in to sound forge using a optical cable to my minidisc player and the results are breath taking,and i thought it was mz-n505 not doing the job ,it must not like rubbish being fed in to it ,really really pleased,thanks again to everyone,best wishes Brian

[sfbp]

wow i have recorded two more minidiscs by running all my mp3 collection in to sound forge using a optical cable to my minidisc player and the results are breath taking,and i thought it was mz-n505 not doing the job ,it must not like rubbish being fed in to it ,really really pleased,thanks again to everyone,best wishes Brian

Could it be as simple as that Sonic Forge (sic) is applying the right digital filters that don't exist in hardware, for the particular conversion you needed?

[scarrabri]

Hi Virtuoso

thank you for your input,and you could be right,it is some thing that is missing, that sony sound forge is adding ,but there again sound forge is doing all the work in converting the mp3 file which still makes me think the mz -n505 is not always working right, and after loading the same set of songs in to my MDS-SD1 SONY DECK and getting excellent results with no drop outs or missed bits ,i am quite sure there is a fault with the mz-n505, i have bought a n707 off ebay which will be here in a few days so i will try that and see what happens, thanks again very best wishes Brian