Hello,
scroll down to the "But sonicstage doesn't seem to like this," paragraph to skip the history on my MD experiences...
I'm a big fan of the minidisc concept, i owned a minidisc a couple of years ago, but then lost it, after having tried some MP3 players (iriver, MSI, iPOD, etc) i just couldn't grasp why no-one could succeed in making a decent portable music player out of the big potential of flash, and hard-disk storage.
So i went out to buy me another sony minidisc player, and i was happy again
Sony has come quite a way with it's minidisc format, i know that the first ones could only play back recorded music, so you needed to record a whole CD instead of just copying it onto there (like an MP3 player). So the concept was the same as the good old cassette format, except it used modern technology.
After that, they brought out MD recorders who could copy mp3,wave,etc files onto a minidisc, however, they needed to be converted to the proprietary ATRAC format.
After some variations on that ATRAC format, sony finally decided to enable the direct playback of MP3's on their MD players/recorders.
This was a giant leap forward in my opinion, because it saved a lot of time putting music on the MD player...
But Sony is of course a big player in the anti-piracy market we know today, so they still decided to build in some kind of protection into their software, to prevent users from copy music on a MD at one place, and copy it back to a PC on another place.
Now i'm not saying that preventing piracy is a bad thing, i even think it should not be done in some cases, if i were an artist of any kind, i'd like to receive money for my creation too, rather than seeing them being spread for free all across the net...
But this mechanism built into sony's sonicstage software, somewhat cripples the functionality of the software.
In my case, my MP3 collection consists of quite some (ll legally purchased of the internet, or ripped from legally purchased CD's) files, and since i've allready experienced the loss of all this data once, i decided to play it more safe this time.
So i put a promise RAID controller in my server, connected two disks to it, and put them in RAID-1 (mirror) mode to give somewhat security against data loss.
Then i created a netowrk share off of them, so i can play them over my whole network (XBOX, SONOS music system, winamp on work-/gamestations).
But sonicstage doesn't seem to like this, in fact it doesn't even allow to use music files that are located on a network source rather then a local drive.
If you try to import files which are located on a network-source, it will offer the ability to copy the files locally, but this isn't really a good solution, since the music collection would have to be copied entirely on one workstation, thus using two times the storage it needs (one time on server, and one time on workstation).
Also the collection is growing every day, because new files are added to it, so i would have to run some kind of synchronisation softare which keeps the workstation and server directories synchronised...
You clearly can see that this is no option.
So what i need/want, is a piece of software or driver, which will allow me to install a network share as a local drive.
I've had a look at a SAN storage box (netgear SC101) but that was a piece of sh*t...
But it did install the network drives as a local drive letter...
So there must be some way to do this, maybe there's some SAN emulation software that does this, but i haven't been able to find anything like it...
So i'm calling out to you, in the hope that anyone knows how i can tackle this problem...
any help is appreciated, thanks.
scroll down to the "But sonicstage doesn't seem to like this," paragraph to skip the history on my MD experiences...
I'm a big fan of the minidisc concept, i owned a minidisc a couple of years ago, but then lost it, after having tried some MP3 players (iriver, MSI, iPOD, etc) i just couldn't grasp why no-one could succeed in making a decent portable music player out of the big potential of flash, and hard-disk storage.
So i went out to buy me another sony minidisc player, and i was happy again
Sony has come quite a way with it's minidisc format, i know that the first ones could only play back recorded music, so you needed to record a whole CD instead of just copying it onto there (like an MP3 player). So the concept was the same as the good old cassette format, except it used modern technology.
After that, they brought out MD recorders who could copy mp3,wave,etc files onto a minidisc, however, they needed to be converted to the proprietary ATRAC format.
After some variations on that ATRAC format, sony finally decided to enable the direct playback of MP3's on their MD players/recorders.
This was a giant leap forward in my opinion, because it saved a lot of time putting music on the MD player...
But Sony is of course a big player in the anti-piracy market we know today, so they still decided to build in some kind of protection into their software, to prevent users from copy music on a MD at one place, and copy it back to a PC on another place.
Now i'm not saying that preventing piracy is a bad thing, i even think it should not be done in some cases, if i were an artist of any kind, i'd like to receive money for my creation too, rather than seeing them being spread for free all across the net...
But this mechanism built into sony's sonicstage software, somewhat cripples the functionality of the software.
In my case, my MP3 collection consists of quite some (ll legally purchased of the internet, or ripped from legally purchased CD's) files, and since i've allready experienced the loss of all this data once, i decided to play it more safe this time.
So i put a promise RAID controller in my server, connected two disks to it, and put them in RAID-1 (mirror) mode to give somewhat security against data loss.
Then i created a netowrk share off of them, so i can play them over my whole network (XBOX, SONOS music system, winamp on work-/gamestations).
But sonicstage doesn't seem to like this, in fact it doesn't even allow to use music files that are located on a network source rather then a local drive.
If you try to import files which are located on a network-source, it will offer the ability to copy the files locally, but this isn't really a good solution, since the music collection would have to be copied entirely on one workstation, thus using two times the storage it needs (one time on server, and one time on workstation).
Also the collection is growing every day, because new files are added to it, so i would have to run some kind of synchronisation softare which keeps the workstation and server directories synchronised...
You clearly can see that this is no option.
So what i need/want, is a piece of software or driver, which will allow me to install a network share as a local drive.
I've had a look at a SAN storage box (netgear SC101) but that was a piece of sh*t...
But it did install the network drives as a local drive letter...
So there must be some way to do this, maybe there's some SAN emulation software that does this, but i haven't been able to find anything like it...
So i'm calling out to you, in the hope that anyone knows how i can tackle this problem...
any help is appreciated, thanks.
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