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Sonistage CP4.1, What's new!

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willykyu

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Hi everybody.

You must wonder what kind of revolution brings the brand new version of Sonicstage CP? well, I'm gonna tell you what I've experienced so far with the software.

(The software is bundled with the japanese version of the NW-S700F 4go I bought 2 days ago. So I'll talk about the new functions of the walkman as well).

First, I've got to tell you there's absolutely nothing to be excited about. Very few improvements.

1) The EXCELLENT:

-You can now sort the list of your walkman in the transfer window by albums. Previously you only could see by

artists or by playlist wich was really hard to delete an album with several artists)

-Normalisation: not from sonicstage, but from the Walkman itself!!! wich is far better I think. No need to create new versions of your MP3/Atrac or lose their original volume.

2)The good:

-I don't remember seeing it in 4.0, but a new codec appears. HE-AAC. Someone cares?

-A new option "import" appears in the transfer window, to import what you recorded on the S700 walkman.

3) The bad

-Slower than before, and transfers to the walkman is really slow.

-Oddly, every cd covers don't transfer to the walkman. Some do some others don't... annoying. Tagging in sonictage has a lot of issues...

3) the "NOW I'M REALLLLY MAD!!!"

-as expected still no UNICODE solution. Still a pain in the ass to use jap, chinese, hebrew or anything alse than your OS language allows!!! Don't even think to import different MP3 tagged in different languages. It simply doesn't work. Applocale still makes the program crash when you connect the walkman... etc.

I'm going to write a petition to SONY, for this can no longer be!!!! I hope many of you will sign it!

Of course, every tracks you ripped in jap, chinese etc in CONNECT Player is useless. Do they really care about sony's consumers? I don't think so.

About the player in a few words, the sound is absolutely fantastic: wonderful bass, clear stereo is neat, noise canceling works fine (you can adjust its sensibility), and the screen is better than before. You still have problems to read in sunshine, but you manage to see something (not the case with A series...).

Less fingerprints problems.

But If you want more infos, we'll talk about that in another thread in the hardware section.

If you have any questions about SS CP 4.1, go ahead.

By the way, only the japanese version and US versions were on the CD. Japanese version is no longer to be selected in an occidental OS (I use a French one...). too bad.

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Slower?! Awwww, nuts! The general lack of efficiency is perhaps my biggest complaint about SS - I have a four year old pc and it chugs along at a snail's pace and takes up what little precious RAM I have. Oh well - now I'll have to try and resist upgrading ;) I mean, how can you not when someone's giving you something 'new' for 'free' :blink:

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Well first of all, yes I could boycott it would be the smartest way, but I love these machines, as they sound extremely good and better and better,the battery life is great and the devices are sexy to me. Also I can't buy other stuff. I don't like the other walkmans, and I stick to ATRAC wich to my ears is my favorite.

Also ,people already don't buy their stuff... and they don't seem to learn...

Then yes I shouldn't be mad if I expected it, but there's always a part of hope as features come little by little (Hi Stuge! I'm back in Japan!).

I haven't tried to burn atrac CD sorry. I don't have any Atrac cd reader.

See ya.

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LMFAO its already too slow for mp3 transfer and now is even slower?!

lol mate its not they dont support unicode, its only that they dont wana support any other language than the machine's firmware language, coz any machine u buy in hk supports chinese character display

but anyway, sony are tightasses to think of user-friendly issues

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If you have any questions about SS CP 4.1, go ahead.

Any chance of creating a copy of the SS 4.1 files, and getting them distributed? I want to report on if SS finally works with Windows Vista, but it's not generally available yet.. If somone wants to ZIP up the US version, and email it to mark.gillespie@NOSPAMgmail.com (remove the NOSPAM), I will give it a try with Vista RC2 and report back here...

Cheers.

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  • 2 weeks later...

You can now sort the list of your walkman in the transfer window by albums. Previously you only could see by

artists or by playlist wich was really hard to delete an album with several artists)

Thats so important, I´ll need this function hardly, I´ve a lot of compilations on my device.

But where I can get SSCP 4.1? On the germen website I can only find version 4.0???

Thanks a lot.

best regards

Marquis

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Thats so important, I´ll need this function hardly, I´ve a lot of compilations on my device.

But where I can get SSCP 4.1? On the germen website I can only find version 4.0???

Thanks a lot.

best regards

Marquis

At the meantime, SonicStage CP 4.1 is only available with the new S700/S600 series. Public download should appear shortly.

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-I don't remember seeing it in 4.0, but a new codec appears. HE-AAC. Someone cares?

Me. HE-AAC nearly doubles the available space, compared to Atrac3+.

HE-AAC@64kBit can be compared to Atrac3+@128kBit.

HE-AAC@48kBit comes very close to Atrac3+@96kBit.

That is, if the Codec included with SS4.1CP is comparable to the NeroDigitalCodec available here:

Nero Digital Audio

because that's what I used for comparison.

Oh, and Winamp 5.1 and up plays it too (Non-DRM).

-Slower than before, and transfers to the walkman is really slow.

That should not happen. Could it be, that the sheer number of supported devices takes its toll?

-as expected still no UNICODE solution. Still a pain in the ass to use jap, chinese, hebrew or anything alse than your OS language allows!!!

Knowing that Unicode text has to be handled on a completely different way than single byte charset based text, it is no wonder. Every bit of code, that handles text has to be rewritten from the ground up, which I guess is two thirds of the whole application. So, personally I expect a Unicode-capable SonicStage at Version 6 or 7 as the earliest. Or a completely different application under a completely different name that replaces SonicStage.

[...] the sound is absolutely fantastic: wonderful bass, clear stereo is neat,

I expect no less from a Sony player...

Edited by Jadeclaw
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Well, i guess re AAC support, on the players applicable, and support for HE-AAC as mentioned in CP 4.1 :-

1. We may at last be able to put to bed the real question standing of whether the AAC-supporting decks actually do support HE-AAC or not.

We really couldn't be certain, in some ways, since if SS was checking (referring back to using SS CP 4.0) the codec and content type then it would almost certainly have found many HE-AAC's were non-transferrable since many HE-AAC's have a nominal bitrate (talking VBR's here) nearer 64K than the min stated supported rate of 80K that the support notes of say the A3000 note with regards to the firmware retrofit.

2. SS itself, in CP 4.0 form, may have actually inhibited non-trancode transferred for the above reason if the files in question were HE-AAC due to not knowing how to handle them as valid transferrable content.

Ok, it's certainly no bit of rocket science to examine an HE encoded file, ignore the bit that tells the app it's HE-encoded, and pass it still regardless provided it's within a supported bit-rate range.

Proof of that, simply, is the simple fact that MP3PRO's can be sent as MP3's despite the fact they are SBR-encoded (as long as the sample rate is in the right range supported by decks and recognition by SS). I mention this because, despite the fact mp3pro is not supported, it is for test purposes, a proof of principle that SBR and PS (such as HE-AAC/ACCPLUS) mode encodings can be passed and sent provided they meet the supported bit-rate and sample-rate restrictions..

But did anyone at Sony, or whoever constructs the soft on their behalf, realise that..??

I doubt it ;)

So to close my AAC comments, great if it's supported fully (HE-AAC i mean, after all.. it'd be a ludicrous thing to offer say CD-RIPPING to HE mode in SS 4.1 if you cannot send the files to a suitable deck without transcoding) - if the support is there (both ways) then i'm sure there are gonna be happy cat spirits within some of the AAC use fans in the community who will be purring inside.

Whether i use such support, depends highly on whether both soft and the firmware of the A3000 will or does support HE mode to both SBR and PS modes (aka AACPLUS) - if it does, great, can finally have a decent low-bit-rate audiobook encoding combo and likewise great for taking the netcasts grabs walkabout to evaluate when away from home :P

WMA.. and Bulk Transfer.. in CP 4.1

I wonder if anyone noticed this, and if it's a mere 4.0 quirk and fixable with 4.1 or simply a prob with bulk transfers... re WMA's.

Was transferring a batch of 48 WMA's (WMA9 standard and WMA8's aka encoding types as used for WMA download offerings, all CBR in my case), and SS rejected two of the tracks. Notably, earlier in the day it had done this with 4 tracks in another bigger Albums transfer (in that instance, selected 10 albums to send in one hit). All the files were 44Khz.

Now the interesting bit is.., i set SS to transfer without conversion, and to not transfer any that were unsuitable without transcode, purely because at that time, i wanted them to not be auto-transcoded to ATRAC.

And there was no reason, at all, why any should fail to be suitable and require transcoding for transfer.

They were all home-produced ex-DRM's (aka i had DRM encoded home-made audio .. some of the stuff i produced to demo local artists works.. at their request, then according to the same method used for PlayForSure compliancy, and subsequently then decrypted copies of them to make them DRM-free to represent how, if you had the legit means to do so where decrypt means removing the DRM the proper way.. not by decode and transcode).

The immediate conclusion i came to, with this transfers rejected instances, was maybe the headers were being misinterpreted in some ways (as the headers may have still contained traces of the former content when protected) and SS subsequently refusing to allow them (but why 4, in one transfer instance.. then 10 in another, in isolation).

Now i know there is no technical reason associated with the fact they are DRM-removed/demuxed, as they are (if i send them to players with zero DRM support) handled and transferred ok and 100% - just SS is having a funny five minutes now and them over them.

But that potential 'getting confused' prospect got blown outa the window when i subsequently re-tried to send the offending rejected items to the A3000 from the library. Then, when i sent each one at a time, they sent and transferred Ok/Fine/'Houston We Are Go' ;)

Could this be a sign of some weakness in bulk transfers between SS 4.0 and the A series decks, or simply SS 4.0..??

Come to think of it, i recall now that when i once tried a bulk transfer and inline transcode of WMA9-LSL's (auto transcode to ATRAC3Plus) using SS 4.0, it also rejected some as being non-transferrable as though they were copy-protected/rights-restricted.. which they definately were not (again, home produced works., no copy protection on this occasion) when i tried to send the bulk batch (in this case, about 200 files across about 10 albums). I forget how many got rejected as being non-permissable to transcode/transer in-line, but it was way too many that when i retried them individually, worked out ok..

Methinks there maybe a WMA support issue here, in SS 4.0.

Hopefully, it wont (if my conclusions pan out to be on the mark) re-occur when 4.1 is around..

I'll await 4.1, with itchy virtual paws and claws, and hopefully end up purring... not wishing an evil and vicious clawing session on whoever did the build ;):P

Be Cool Always

'Tom Kat'

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We really couldn't be certain, in some ways, since if SS was checking (referring back to using SS CP 4.0) the codec and content type then it would almost certainly have found many HE-AAC's were non-transferrable since many HE-AAC's have a nominal bitrate (talking VBR's here) nearer 64K than the min stated supported rate of 80K that the support notes of say the A3000 note with regards to the firmware retrofit.

2. SS itself, in CP 4.0 form, may have actually inhibited non-trancode transferred for the above reason if the files in question were HE-AAC due to not knowing how to handle them as valid transferrable content.

In SS4.0, this question never arises, as SonicStage refuses to import any HE-AAC file.

Even if it is at or above 80kBit.

Proof of that, simply, is the simple fact that MP3PRO's can be sent as MP3's despite the fact they are SBR-encoded (as long as the sample rate is in the right range supported by decks and recognition by SS). I mention this because, despite the fact mp3pro is not supported, it is for test purposes, a proof of principle that SBR and PS (such as HE-AAC/ACCPLUS) mode encodings can be passed and sent provided they meet the supported bit-rate and sample-rate restrictions..

I guess, you are threading on a very thin wire here...

MP3Pro has been designed to be fully backward compatible with MP3.

If played back with a standard MP3-Device or decoder, the SBR-part is ignored just as it is not there. However, a HE-AAC-stream/file is completely different compared to the standard LC-AAC. A pure LC-AAC-decoder/device is not capable of playing back HE-AAC-encoded files. So infact, you have to treat the two variants as two different formats.

But did anyone at Sony, or whoever constructs the soft on their behalf, realise that..??

I doubt it ;)

They realised it. To the full extend. Remember that SonicStage got new codecs as soon as the accompanying device could handle it. It was the case with Atrac3+(HiMD), it was the case with LC-AAC(the soap-box-HD-players). So I guess, the players, where this version was included can playback HE-AAC.

Whether i use such support, depends highly on whether both soft and the firmware of the A3000 will or does support HE mode to both SBR and PS modes (aka AACPLUS)

It won't. As the device is older than SS4.1.

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Has anyone who uses SS4.1 noticed if this version has any effect on the player it is used with?

What I mean by this is that SS4.0 changed the order in which albums appeared on the screen of my players, and there was no apparent logic behind this order (not alphabetical order, not in order of transfer from PC to player, etc). I raised this on here as soon as SS4.0 was released, and this is why I still use SS3.4 - at least now everything appears on the player in alphabetical order.

The players concerned were my old HD1 (now sadly departed to the great hi-fi shop in the sky), and the HD5H and A608 that I still use. (My new A3000 has never been connected to SS4.0 - I have always used SS3.4 with it.) The PC concerned has Windows XP SP2 and is up to date with all the latest patches.

Does anyone know if this issue has been resolved with SS4.1?

Edited by peterjf
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Well, the question of HE-AAC support was a valid and previously questioned aspect - it occurred within this forum before i brought it up again.. and the simple fact that SS 4.0 did not support HE-AAC directly was not absolute proof of device implementation or not, as if the transfer manager is not handling the audio correctly re determining it (through a lack of support capable of recognising the diff between HE and non-HE AAC encodings) then it could easily be rejecting the HE audio regardless of device support.

So it's still a valid aspect to explore, of which we will only know for certain when SS 4.1 becomes available.

I certainly was not skating on thin ice, or treading a thin wire, in my mention of AACPlus/HE-AAC in an analogy to MP3/MP3PRO transfer handling. All i was saying was that where the AAC version of similarity/compatibility was passable enough (and if the AAC handler in SS was up to the job and likewise in the supporting codec implement in the destination decks - be it legacy mode or direct SBR/PS supporting) that it was not beyond reason to be able to allow the SBR/PS and SBR encoded AAC audio to transfer untouched.

I was not directly comparing MP3PRO and HE-AAC and AACPlus as being 1:1 comparable in their content and implementation of encoding and subsequent decode demands - sure, where they are entirely different alien beasts (the SBR and SBR/PS versions) that maybe only share a basic header and container component but otherwise very different in the decodable aspect, then the passing aspect and subsequent device handling is a whole different ball game, and then in such an instance, not straighforward.

As for HE-AAC handling on the A series, and your conclusion that there is no implentation on the A series due to it being older than SS 4.1 ...

Firstly, the relative age issue is not proof or conclusive reason to discard the question as being null or pointless.

As you should recall, the A series decks preceed SS 4.0, and a firmware implement was used to bring AAC support into the A-series and the flash decks. So whether the decks can decode HE-AAC is not dependent on SS's support, SS's support only restricts (due to handling) the transfer permission/tolerence.

So unless there is zero implemented HE-AAC handling in the device firmware, the question is still open and valid. If the firmware is not implenting HE-AAC support as yet (questionable, since we can't get such AAC transferred to test with .. and outside of official confirmation to the effect, that's the only other way we'll know), then that's still not a done deal that an predated deck cannot be retrofitted.. they already did it to a wide range of decks for SS 4.0. vis a firmware release, which in itself was almost uncharacteristically non-typical Sony policy (they usually implement in a new model and force you to buy a new variant to get there).

I'll wait til i get SS 4.1, and test for myself, and explore dealing with Sony directly for official confirmation i think in the meantime.

Guess maybe i was seen to be out of line to bring up such things in these hallowed circles, well where that's a prob, it's in the eye and mind of the beholder.. not mine ;)

'Tom Kat'

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BTW Folks, i think i managed to locate a japanese 4.01 updater, and maybe may have figured how to get it to install into an English lang Win environment.

Will post back later, one way or the other...

*scarpers, kinda hard to do with all virtual paws and claws crossed hoping for a lucky result*

'Tom Kat'

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Hi All!!

I also have to say that the Album View on the connected Walkman side is the most important thing for me!!!

It took for more than a year to fix that bug!!!

I tried the new HE-AAC Codec. Ok at 96 kbit/s but my HD5 will not support it.

Even my Walkman phone W810i is not supporting it.

So Mp3 192kbit/s or Atrac 192kbit/s rules for me.

I cannot agree that the transfer to the player is slow!!! I tried with my HD5 and it really faster than ever before!!

So far.

Bye

Tom

Edit:

What i hate:

I imported all my Atrac files into the SS4.2. And it cannot check the compilations allthough i marked them before in SS4.0 as comilations!!!! Is SS not writing this information to id3 tag or what?

I allways have to set it again as compilations and that can be a really bad job if you have a lot of music.

And the sorting is confused!! I try to sort is by selecting all tracks and the sort it by Cd Track number. I will see.

Bye again

Tom

Edited by lindijones
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