SACD Ripping using an Oppo or Pioneer? Yes, it's true!

[Dick Darlington]

1 hour ago, MikeyFresh said:

All of the above needs to be inside an enclosing folder called AutoScript.

 

Actually only one AutoScript file is necessary. The Sony players don’t care if it’s the .TSS or the sans extension one. I have never tested to determine which is dominant if both are present. The Oppo players don’t recognize the script unless it has the .TSS extension. No clue about the Pioneers.  My guess is they’re the opposite of the Oppo and only recognize the extensionless script. 

[Dick Darlington]

1 hour ago, MikeyFresh said:

Tough to say then what exactly was going wrong in today's problem case,

 

Well I don’t know what, or rather which problem it actually was in the end but the two scripts were markedly different and one being for the Telnet method as you pointed out. All this time that I’ve known that only one of the two duplicate scripts is required for a given player and that the Sonys don’t care which (.TSS or not), I’ve never considered what might happen if both are present yet different. Do both get executed sequentially? If so which is parsed first? 🤔 

[Dick Darlington]

18 hours ago, Phthalocyanine said:

I leave any further explanations on formatting USB drives to our resident expert @Dick Darlington

 

Well I spent some time looking around the house for an expert of one form or another and sadly I found none.  I didn't want to come up completely empty handed so I figured a series of pictures would have to do.

 

TL;DR:  After trying myself, it went exactly as @MeiSh5am described.  Windows does indeed initialize and format a small uninitialized USB disk without a partition scheme.  Neither MBR or GPT.  Just a single volume containing the file system.  Such a disk will mount as sda and NOT sda1.  Of course this is somewhat mitigated by using the "/mnt/sd*" technique in the AutoScript, however I have reason to believe the Oppos will have problems with a "no partition" disk regardless.

 

Starting with an uninitialized disk, i.e. one with NO partition table or volumes, on my Mac ...

... and then inserting the disk on a Windows 10 system, it shows up as RAW in Windows Disk Manager.

 

 

An attempt to open the disk by double clicking it in Windows Explore results in this ...

 

 

Okay let's do it and see what happens ...

 

 

After formatting on Windows, it's back to the Mac.  Lo and behold the mystery of how my one "special" disk got that way is solved!!!  Sure enough this disk is now a partition less disk having a FAT32 volume at the physical disk level as seen by the Mac.  I also looked via the command line diskutil command and it is neither MBR nor GPT nor anything else.  Note the "disk5" in the lower right corner.  That translates to /mnt/sda when inserted in the player.

Okay so now after being properly prepared for SACD ripping, there are two levels depicted in the Mac Disk Utility for the same disk:  The top (physical disk level) showing the partition layout ...

... and the "child" level showing the volume and file system info.  Note the "disk5s1".  This translates to "/mnt/sda1" on the player.  Had it been "disk5s2", then it would mount as "/mnt/sda2" on the player and so on.

[Dick Darlington]

2 hours ago, 007james said:

I have the Sony 590 and I'm not sure how many different ways you can write up instructions but in the end none of them really work, am i missing something?

 

Indubitably. 

[Dick Darlington]

31 minutes ago, Phthalocyanine said:

But this is the part I don't get -- is the problem with these partition-less USB drives simply that they show up as sda and not sda1 and thus don't work for the stock scripts.  Or on some fundamental level, does the lack of a partition make them unreadable to the Oppo -- and is this only a problem for the Oppo and not the Sony or Pioneer?

 

Yes. 

 

More specifically ... definitely yes wrt to the sda vs sda1 thing. As for the second ... that is what I remember observing when I experimented with my special USB disk 3 or 4 weeks ago — that is the Oppo wouldn’t launch the AutoScript from a partitionless drive whereas the Sony would. But it has been a few weeks and I didn’t spend that much time on it so I’d rather hedge on the side of caution until I make a sanity check pass at it. 

[Dick Darlington]

41 minutes ago, Phthalocyanine said:

The other thing is that it seems to me to be fairly difficult to create a partition-less USB drive in the first place.  Or to put it another way -- once a USB drive has a partition, it seems difficult to get rid of it with a regular formatting program (like the default Windows formatter).  You need to use a  some heavy duty partitioning program like GParted and delete the old partition and then fail to create a new partition.

 

Well yes and no. Until today I *believed* it was hard to make a partitionless disk like the one that just was that way and gave me so many headaches a few years back. God knows I tried everything including GParted and low level command line utilities to reproduce it with no success. Turns out it’s easy ... automatic even if the stars are aligned a certain way. Meaning you’re starting with an uninitialized disk and you format it via the pop up that Windows 10 presents when you attempt to open the disk via Explorer. As it turns out I never format via that path so I never saw it. I always go straight to Disk Manager or sometimes DISKPART. Furthermore, most of the time a USB stick will have already been formatted and thus already initialized with whatever partition scheme. In that case you’d have to go out of your way to brute force clear the partition info before this would ever happen. Not something you can do with the Windows GUI. You need to use the DISKPART command line utility to de-initialize the disk. It’s not really heavy duty since it’s a native windows utility but even so it’s not something most people would arbitrarily do; or even know how to do without looking for it. Nevertheless I suspect some percentage of USB disks end up in users’ hands either uninitialized or already formatted without a partition scheme. In the latter case reformatting will not change that. 

[Dick Darlington]

1 hour ago, Phthalocyanine said:

So in order to get a partition-less USB drive, you'd have to obliterate the existing partition with specialty software like GParted and then format it in Windows 10 (which is apparently dumb enough to format it with a file system without creating a partition).

 

Yep. It seems that way to me. Who knew!? 😂 

 

Well except I couldn’t figure out a way to do it with GParted but the Windows DISKPART CLEAR command will make short work of it. 

[Dick Darlington]

8 hours ago, mindset said:

It is probably the former since I see this hard coded in bdpprog (the main player program) in the BDP-105 firmware:

/mnt/sda1/AutoScript/AutoScript.TSS

 

Awesome @mindset! That explains a lot!  Possibly even a few differences wrt case sensitivity between the Sony and Oppo players I noticed many moons ago. 

[Dick Darlington]

2 hours ago, MikeyFresh said:

Makes me want to try exFAT with Sony and Pioneer, perhaps it works with those too.

 

ExFAT is not supported on the Sony S590s which is somewhat of a drag for local ripping Mac users. Presumably the same is true for other Sony S590-like variants but that’s just a reasonable assumption. 

[Dick Darlington]

Unplug the power cord. Wait 2.7 seconds. Plug it back in. 

[Dick Darlington]

9 hours ago, Kurt said:

I re-downloaded AutoScript.zip per MikeyFresh’s post (#4536), unzipped the file, copied the AutoScript directory and contents to my flash drive and it’s working like a charm!  I had downloaded the files, individually, before and it apparently it wasn’t quite right.  Thank you!!

 

Then how was it possible for your original USB drive preparation to work initially? It worked for 2 or 3 rips and then the same USB  became not quite right because the files that worked at first were unable to continue working because of they way they were initially downloaded? Does not compute. 🧠 💣💥 

[Dick Darlington]

The script presented several posts ago, which is designed for Telnet does not contain the line commanding the tray to open by design. 

[Dick Darlington]

3 hours ago, snafu_ said:

 

I didn't mess around with the scripts at all. The tray is opening, so I know it's running

 

No actually you do not know that it [sacd_extract] is running simply because the tray opened. 

 

All you know is that the AutoScript has executed. Not the same thing. There are a variety of things that can result in sacd_extract failing whilst the AutoScript has executed. I believe the most common reason; one that has been biting newcomers in the arse for years is attempting the process without a properly USB drive. 

 

(Now, if this were a drinking game, about 15 or 20 blokes just slammed back a shot of their spirit of choice.) 

[Dick Darlington]

3 hours ago, snafu_ said:

Well, you guys have repeatedly stated this procedure is real finnicky about the USB drives.

 

To be more specific: the procedure is quite finicky about USB drives that have not been properly prepared. There are no USB brands/models/capacities/etc known to have ever been the cause of execution failure w/r/t this procedure. Never ever ever. Not one. Unfortunately proper USB preparation procedures have been exhaustively documented and widely ignored. 

 

Now to quote Father Jack ... DRINK!!

[Dick Darlington]

13 minutes ago, MeiSh5am said:

documentation at the beginning of the thread should be updated with instructions how to partition format a USB drive "correctly" and how to verify that that is the case.

 

I can’t edit Post 1, but I have put this out there on one or two occasions. Maybe this is a good time for a redo 

 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/t4cb052y4ivzblj/The SACD Ripper’s Guide to the macOS Media Formatting Universe.pdf?dl=0

 

DRINK!!

[Dick Darlington]

5 hours ago, SACD_Rip_Pup said:

I guess now that I have documented that fact, others won't fall into the same trap. 

🤔 

[Dick Darlington]

8 minutes ago, joehirez said:

Both formatted with FAT32.

It’s been a while. And a few brain surgeries for removal of cannabis pearls later, which BTW rarely occur but often appear in clusters when they do ... anyway I have to wonder if the iso image may be larger than the 4Gb per file FAT32 limit. 

[Dick Darlington]

55 minutes ago, joehirez said:

C:\Users\Joe>telnet 10.0.1.20 2002

The telnet connection must be made via the default telnet port, i.e. port 23, not 2002, which is the port sacd_extract listens on. 

[Dick Darlington]

Fancy Bear strikes again!

[Dick Darlington]

Grasping for straws but is it possible you’re low on disk space and what you are observing is the resultant behavior? (as opposed to iso2dsd aborting with an insufficient storage error)

[Dick Darlington]

4 minutes ago, Mike6f said:

The issue isn't bits, its mixing and mastering, sometimes the DSD and Redbook don't have the same mix or mastering. 16 vs 24 bits is just marketing BS, nothing real world or audible.

Fires up popcorn machine. Sits on hands. Waits patiently …

[Dick Darlington]

3 minutes ago, jegreenwood said:

Reported speed is 0.20 MBs/Sec

Possibly a WiFi issue? I’ve found that although it *can* work very well over WiFi it can also run at a snail’s pace if the WiFi link is not rock solid. I suspect but do not know for a fact that it doesn’t tolerate a bursty connection as well as other applications, eg file sharing or media streaming. If you’re on WiFi maybe try a direct Ethernet link or move closer to your router if the former is not practical.