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Why the hell are you using SonicStage?

Ben Hardwidge

Posted in Staff on August 3, 2007 at 4:02 pm

It’s easy to get a gag out of Sony these days. You’d think the robotic dog maker would have been humbled by the whole Betamax thing in the 1980s, but a quarter of a century later there’s still a gradually-filling graveyard of proprietary Sony products that have completely failed to take the world by storm. At the last count this included: MemoryStick, SACD, High-density CD-R (anyone else remember them?), Micro-DIMM, UMD, MiniDisc, ATRAC, SonicStage and, of course, the yet-to-be-proven Blu-Ray.

But while it’s easy to point and laugh at Sony, most of these products aren’t actually bad at all. As a case in point, I’ve just had to explain to my fellow colleagues why I use Sony SonicStage for about the tenth time this year. Now, before I start coming across as a Sony salesman, I’d like to point out that I know Sonic Stage isn’t perfect. I don’t like Sony’s DRM-heavy Connect music store, early versions of the software were quite buggy and I hate the way it messes about with stuff like Artist Link data (whatever that is) when I connect a Walkman. However, SonicStage has a terrible reputation that’s (for the most part) undeserved.

You can’t beat MiniDisc for recording vinyl

The first reason why I use Sonic Stage is practicality. My fiancé has a Sony hard drive Walkman, and until recently I was using a Hi-MD MiniDisc recorder to finally digitise my ballooning vinyl collection.

Why use MiniDisc, though, why not record straight to the hard drive? Simply because I have hundreds of records, and I didn’t have the time for faffing about with WAV editors. With MiniDisc, you just plug the MiniDisc recorder into the tape recorder socket on a hifi amp, set your recording level with the dial then and record whatever’s going through it. This hi-fi amp route also makes life a lot easier for recording vinyl, as the amp already has a built-in pre-amp.

Hi-MD offers the quickest and easiest way to record music digitally in real-time

Recording real-time music with MiniDisc is (by far) the quickest and easiest way of doing it. In fact, we even use a Hi-MD recorder to record the Custom PC podcast, just because it makes the whole job so much quicker and easier. The recorder even lets you set track gaps easily by pressing a button, and record audio in 16-bit/44.1KHzPCM format with no compression. I then use SonicStage to transfer the raw PCM file to my PC, burn that straight to CD so that I have a rippable back-up (i.e. I never have to record the record in real-time again) and then convert the PCM files into ATRAC Advanced Lossless files for my PC audio jukebox.

SonicStage works great on touchscreens

I’ll write a full blog on my PC audio jukebox at some point, as it’s possibly the most awesome piece of kit in my lounge (he said, without a hint of modesty!), but in the meantime I’ll just sum it up by saying that it’s a PC running Windows XP in a hi-fi sized unit with a full touchscreen. This basically means that I have full access to anything that can be done in Windows from my hi-fi rack, with no messing around with extra monitors, mice or plugging the PC into the TV, which is exactly what you want for full flexibility over your music collection.

Anal organisation

This is the other reason why I use SonicStage, which is that it’s just perfect for low-resolution touchscreen operation. Using the Album Icons view, SonicStage neatly displays your album covers in a format that’s small enough to get plenty of albums on a single screen, but big enough to see the pictures. You basically just touch your album cover and then touch the Play button. From a purely anal point of view, I also appreciate the way in which SonicStage automatically organises your albums in alphabetical order of artist, and then organises those albums into chronological order. So, for example, the Iron Maiden section goes from ‘The Soundhouse Tapes’ (1979) to ‘A Matter of Life and Death’ (2006) in the right order.

SonicStage displays the albums in chronological order by artist, and you can get 15 on the screen at one time at 800 x 600; great for a low-resolution touchscreen

This is exactly how I organise my records, and it’s a good way to keep everything in order. By comparison, the Album View in iTunes only displays a couple of album covers on a single screen at 800 x 600, it doesn’t list them in chronological order and it’s also very slow to scroll down the list (yes, believe it or not, SonicStage is much quicker at this). As well as this, SonicStage also has an alphabet section on the left for selecting the initial of the artist you want for easy selection. Again, this works great with the touchscreen; you just select your letter, your artist and then your album.

At 800 x 600, iTunes’ Album View only displays two album covers, and you can’t organise them by artist and then by date

In defence of iTunes, I do really love the Cover Flow display in iTunes, especially the reflections of the album covers, but this doesn’t work very well with a touchscreen, and it also makes it slow to get to the album you want. While I’m on the subject of iTunes, I also really like iTunes’ feature for sharing your music over a network, which you can’t do with SonicStage. However, this feature is irrelevant when you just want to access a massive music collection on a single PC.

The iTunes Cover Flow view looks gorgeous, but it’s not practical for quick browsing

ATRAC rules

Finally, the other major selling point for SonicStage is the compression supported. Okay, so it doesn’t support Ogg or FLAC, but it does support all the major standards such as WMA, MP3, WAV and even Apple’s AAC files. More importantly, however, it supports the king of compression technologies: ATRAC3plus. While previous ATRAC formats had arguably punchier sound quality than MP3, they also had a tendency to sound noticeably clipped or compressed, a bit like using a top-end tape deck with Dolby C.

This is another reason why the Sony Connect store sucks balls; the files are encoded using 132Kb/sec ATRAC3, and for some reason Sony seems to record the tracks at a ridiculous recording level, resulting in severe clipping. At least, that’s certainly the case on the tracks I’ve purchased from the store; I might post some samples for comparison at some point.

However, Sony completely nailed the whole compression thing with ATRAC3plus, making a great-sounding compression system that has been sadly overlooked by the industry. It sounds (IMHO) better than MP3, and Sony has also introduced ATRAC Advanced Lossless compression in the last few months, which sounds fantastic. The bonus of ATRAC Advanced Lossless over FLAC, however, is that you can set a ‘base’ bitrate for portable devices before encoding the audio. This means I get the lossless audio on my stereo, but that it only takes a few seconds to transfer the 256Kb/sec ATRAC3plus file to my fiance’s Walkman.

ATRAC Advanced Lossless compression sounds fantastic, and makes quick work of transferring your lossless files to a portable device

So, there you go. Taunt me if you like, but I’m going to continue to use SonicStage as my music player of choice on my PC audio jukebox because it’s the best program for the job, and I think MiniDisc and ATRAC3plus are fine (and extremely useful) technologies. Just because they were produced by a huge conglomerate doesn’t mean they’re necessarily bad.

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