Well.. I tried out AAL and it churns around for a minute or so then tells me it cannot process any of the tracks. All the tracks I tried to convert are wave files, NOT produced by SS, but imported into SS.

When I right click a single one I get a title to the error box of Sonic Stage (00000908-6482) but an error of (00000000) whatever those numbers mean.

The error box says "cannot convert the specified track. Possible reasons may include" and lists

SS does not support the format....
copyright
files missing

Ideas please.

Use FLAC

Sure. but then another whole layer of technology I don't particularly want. I checked, and AAL is supposed to work.

How would you play it on the MiniDisc...?



this is very wierd, as I do exactly the same thing:
I rip the tracks with my Linux box (and store them as FLAC, to save space); then whenever I need to transfer something to the MD, I just "inflate" the traks back to WAV, import them in SS and throw them into the MD using AAL. Although I don't really know whether SS is storing them as AAL or AT3 @ 352 on the MiniDisc -I would like someone can shed some light on this one- (I own a MZ-NH900), thou' the resulting sound is amazing anyway.

I know for sure that SS refuses to create AAL files from sources other than WAV files and/or direct CD ripping; and since WAV doesn't contain any DRM thingy, it's really strange what is happening to you... Hard disk full, perhaps? Weird track names? Read-only WAVs? I don't know, just saying everything that comes to my mind...


Cheers, A.

Thanks

1. Tracks are not readonly
2. Tracks are not ripped
3. Disk is nowhere near full

That leaves funny file names. I'll investigate further.

Interestingly the only time it worked I was doing a direct import from CD.

Right now I have gone really retro, since I got a MXD-D400 which has Type-S and can rip 2 CD's direct onto a single 80 disk. This totally avoids filling up my HD with the tracks from canned CD's.

Type-S is amazingly good both in headphones and into stereo system, I am happy to report. A Sony HiMD deck would be amazing but I wont spend the money on onkyo which doesnt even have digital out.

The point of all this is trying to pare my HD down to a minimum and keep it that way so I can use it for other things. Especially after I discovered how desperately fragile the whole thing is with respect to System Restore.

Thanks.

I found some really weird behaviour of SS because I had deleted **all** "optimized files". However the db thinks they are still there and gives me errors because it tries to take one of the optimized ones and they are gone. This is quite bizarre because it was picking LP2 over 256k (Hi-SP). I observed this behaviour just trying to make CD from files in SS.

It's my guess that something like this was happening when I tried to do the AAL compression.

The interesting thing is that SS may try to pick the "wrong" compression file at times.

I got at least one file to compress properly along the lines of what you describe, I may reattempt more later.

it could be. I always remove optimized files, thou' through SS itself...



mmm, this might have something to do with the way SS deal with converions... there are some checkboxes you may want to look at, regarding whether SS will automatically transform to a predefined (default) format, or just ask you every time what should it convert the original to, before transferring.
I cannot tell you what my settings are straight away, but surely, poking here and there you should, sooner or later, be able to convert your WAVs to AAL.

All the best, A.

Yes once I cleaned up the DB it seemed to work. Annoying that when you leave the wave files there, it doesn't show both WAV and AAL in the file info in properties, like it does for other compressions.

Where is the setting to have SS delete optimized files please?

its in the toolbox icon in the transfer window.

thanks, I know about that one, was hoping there was a way to clear up "at will" rather than automatically.

Stephen