Giga Juke

[Martin_Smith]

I have a sony giga juke.  It will not turn on using the remote - it is showing a blue flashing light as if it is in standby but the controls on the unit or the remote will not work.  This happended before and I had to turn it off at the mains.  Has anyone had this problem.

[SteveJudd]

Guys, Give them time! The Jukes are working, just not on the internet. If you take your system off the network then they work fine. Alright they are not 100% but to be honest the only reason mine was on the network was for my extender box. Currently I have this feeding off my PC for its music.

Yes you may want to get to Gracenote but for me the Gigajuke is too slow to rip music. I prefer to rip mine on my PC, add the album cover via MP3TAG and import to the gigajuke via USB stick, much quicker! I transferred some 5 GB to mine yesterday in around an hour. It analysed it overnight and switched straight on this morning fine.

Sony have a fix, they are testing it fully before release, this is normal for any Technical helpdesk resolution. You would soon be screaming if they released it and it didnt work, just look at the comments re the workaround!

[simonjash]

Well written Steve

I fully support your understanding and commen sense approach.

Some people enjoy starting Monday Morning Bad Vibes .

A little patience goes a long way.

[NorthernCoochy]

How much time should we give them. Already been waiting on this forum for 2 months and no further forward. Am sure you'd be frustrated if we're still sat here in January waiting for the promised solution.

Steve - good for you that you've found a workable solution, but I bought the Gigajuke to be a one off purchase, multiroom music system. Personally I don't have the resources or desire to get a bunch of additional tech to get this running. The Gigajuke was my last major tech purchase and likely to be so for a while!

I JUST WANT THE GIGAJUKE TO DO WHAT IT IS SUPPOSED TO!

If I wanted a individual, large hard disk mp3 player with quick rip time, I would probably have just bought a 160GB iPod, and downloaded everything from iTunes. But that would be good for me and stuff the rest of the family.

[sphinxxxxx]

Hi SteveJudd,  although I understand where you are coming from,  unfortunately the jukes are not working, for they need to access the  internet to do so.  At the moment they are oversized, expensive MP3/CD  players only.

What I, and presumably other users, are upset about is  the lack of communication to juke users who do not access this forum,  and lack of regular communication on this forum.  We are now 2 months  into the problem, and are still asking Sony for an explanation of what  the problem is and when we can expect to have the fix.  What we have had  is outright lies from customer service, a temporary fix which didnt  work, and a post to say a fix has been found with no other details.  Not  a lot to give the users confidence in Sony.

Like Hailsham26, I too will not be buying Sony from now on.

[simonjash]

Dear all

I have been monitoring your banter for some time and as well  I have been looking at the problem that we are having and agree that it is frustrating.

One little test that I have tried a couple of times which appears to work is as follows.

Since I have not been able to connect to the internet wirelessly  or to my satalite units via AOSS I have linked via my Lan cable and have noted that the system does appear to contact gracenote if you load a new CD or even asked the unit to aquire updated new information about the CD.

Given that it would appear to go on line to do this I decided the next time it locked up that I would just disconnect the Lan cable and see what happen.

On 2 occassions this has happened once pulling the lan cable the system shut down and then would reboot having re connected the Lan cable

Can any one else see if this is a fluke or a general state of play when it locks up.

You never know !!!

[SteveJudd]

All,

I understand your frustrations but Sony will only release the fix once it is tested. Granted, 2 months to wait for a) the admission of the issue b) solution, is too long but it is what it is.

Sony will release the solution when tested.

My "workaround" was to assist others at least get their boxes (standalones) working and to provide a means of still getiing music onto the system.

What you are asking for is a "drains up" on what has occurred and the solution. In all my experience in TECH SUPPORT the drains up comes at the end, not during the investigation. Yes Sony's attitude and initial response was appauling but they are onside now. Whether they choose to learn from this is down to them.

Lowering head below the parapit!

[sphinxxxxx]

Point taken Steve.  Let us hope that the 'fix' is released soon - and that it works.

[DaveWA]

I have been watching the forum and waiting patiently for the fix. Surprised by the amount of vitriol towards Sony and other posters, but then again patience is a virtue!!

Just for the record I have a NAS500 HDE it has 6200+ tracks running S/W 1.00.08. I have applied the temporary fix and it works!!! The unit does NOT latch up, I ripped a CD last night (released in Sept) and the unit accessed Gracenote, downloaded track data correctly and saved to HDD. Switched off via remote, display blanked but blue light pulsated as it "analysed" the CD recorded earlier. Left it to get on with it, when I looked this morning the unit was in its standby state with no pulsating blue light.

Since I have had the unit for 3 years it is well out of warranty and the ploy of "not fit for purpose" would look a bit thin, as the fix will be here shortly and the legal system grinds exceeding slow. To be fair the GigaJuke is not one of Sony's greatest products, and my guess is that it will be quietly dropped from the range.

[SteveJudd]

Dave, the 55s seem to be greater affected judging by the responses in this forum. Personally I have a gut feeling nothing is wrong with the Gigajukes, it's an external influence causing this. I have a theory I will share with you all.

Recently Sony have been victim to large much publicised hacking attempts which took down the ps network. My theory is that due to these attacks Sony has had to look long and hard at the public facing servers and beef up security. The Gigajuke range as far as I can tell is not sold anymore and probably not for at least 6 months. I reckon there was a Gigajuke server sitting in a data centre in Japan and as part of a security sweep was identified as obsolete due to the end of life of the product and removed. Whilst most of the Gigajukes work, they are hard coded to go look for this server IF they have a network connection. This explains why units not on a network have no signs of failure. The process of looking for this server is stopping a service running on the Gigajuke causing the lock up.

Only a theory but it would be interesting to find out if I'm close

[johnnnywalker]

Hi all, mine now has the same fault for about 3 months, thought it was something I was doing wrong!!

Strange thing is that the panasonic 50" plasma can connect to this unit as well as any other media stremers on the same network. Will watch this post now as only just found it tonight, after looking around the net.