Sunday, May 20, 2007

Sony Sonicstage

We all love Sonicstage, Sony's music transfer program. No, not really, in fact, I've heard of people who adore Sony's Digital Audio Player hardware but refuse to buy one of their players for fear of this dreaded music transfer program. Sony realise that this is holding them back, and have in fact tried to ditch Sonicstage in the past (by coming up with "Connect Player", which was EVEN WORSE!). Luckily, the tides are changing and while SonicStage no longer crashes every few minutes, it still has some annoying problems.

So...

1. STUPIDLY LONG TRANSFER TIME: I once left Sonicstage on all night (and it was a long night, we're talking 12 hours of me wrapped up in bed, snoring loudly), transferring about 3gb of tracks to my new Flash Walkman player. When I woke up and came downstairs the thing had still not finished, in fact, it seemed to have frozen, leaving me no choice but to unplug the player, corrupting the entire database.
2. ENHANCED CD UNRIPPABLE: remember Enhanced CDs? Those annoying CDs that had a crappy QuickTime music video included on a Data track? Does anyone know how I managed to rip them and get them into SonicStage? I don't know either, but sometimes it likes them, sometimes it doesn't.
3. THE MYSTERY OF THE MISSING COVER ART: why oh why can I assign cover art to tracks in the program with no problems, yet the damn pictures will just randomly NOT show up on the player? I have absolutely no clue why this happens, because SonicStage gives me no meaningful reason to assume there's a problem.
4. GENRE, ALBUM AND ARTIST INFORMATION DISPLAYED ON PLAYER BEARS ABSOLUTELY *NO RESEMBLANCE* TO DATA ENTERED IN SONICSTAGE: self-explanitory. Sometimes SonicStage will use the tags you enter yourself whilst transferring tracks. Other times it will completely IGNORE what you just typed and use the tags embedded in the MP3 file itself.
5. Program wants to re-transfer each of your tracks (creating two copies) for seemingly NO REASON
6. Down-converting tracks to ATRAC3 64kbps tin-o-rama, without being asked: why? Why would I want to do this despite already telling the program to use a better bit rate?

Oh well. At least the sound quality and usability of Sony's players normally makes it worth the annoyance. Better yet, it seems that in future players, Sony are set to allow us to simply drag and drop tracks onto the device without using its silly program. Will anyone miss SonicStage once it's dead and buried? Not I.

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