external hard drives + pocket vaio

[microbat]

Hi all.
Has anyone tried using an external hard drive to put sonic stage on and then using the drive to save music to?
I am getting fed up with having to reinstall all my c.d's back on to the p.c. because of D.R.M.. i have been having serious p.c. problems and have had to reinstall windows a couple of times.
I now have a stable platform again but I want to try to find a work around to save me weeks worth of ripping.
I would use GYM but I believe it only works for mp3's.
any help would be appreciated.
Also could this be a work around so that i could use my vaio with my laptop as well as my main p.c.?
your thoughts would be most welcome
:smileygrin:

[chris_lewis]

Do you not have a backup? seems the easiest way. granted you wont have your most recently ripped stuff but its better than nothing. there really is nothing you can do but re rip, if its any help SS 3.4 is quite fast now.

Im not really sure if an external HD would work.

[microbat]

hi.
Thanks for the reply. no unfortunatley when my p.c. went tits up I didn't back the music files up, as i only had limited space on a second internal hard drive and chose to rescue my digital pictures (the wife would kill me if i lost those!).
I was forced to clean reinstall windows. The hard drive then went and died so i rebuilt the p.c. virtually from scratch.
It looks like i can look forward to many hours of ripping again as my vaio was completely full. Nevermind. I will probably buy an external hard drive to save me from having to rerip again in the future and just copy them back to the p.c. if required. As it can take ages to locate covers for some of the more obscure and deleted albums.

[chris_lewis]

FWIW, if you get the new version of Sonic Stage it will work with MP3 you can also rip in this format, if you try to copy Atrac files between drives they will not play once moved, DRM is really annoying at times. if you have all your files as MP3s your not limited to just one PC either

SS 3.4 now grabs cover art for you too, although your still right about the obscure stuff lol.

[microbat]

thanks. that's useful to know. I think it's a case of bye bye to atrac and hello again to good old mp3!

[chris_lewis]

If you want to store your music on an external HD yes, Atrac still sounds better though hehe