Neuros Technology Forums

Hi all, I have been greatly enjoying my Neuros II up until a few days ago, when it stopped shutting down when I held the play/pause button. It shows the screen saying "Shutting down..." and the hard drive spins up but then it just hangs. It will do this until the battery dies or until I remove the backpack from the player.

To force it to turn off, hold the play/power button and press up on the joy stick. You are then going to have to reformat the memory in the "brain". Put the unit in diagnostic mode by holding down the 1 and 5 buttons and then pressing play. The diagnostic mode should come up. If it doesn't, disconect the brain from the backpack, reinsert the brain and try again. In diagnostics, choose to select NAND Disk and then format NAND Disk. Don't worry about the warning message, the data on your hard drive won't be touched. Choose yes and when it is done, you should be back to normal.

To force it to turn off, hold the play/power button and press up on the joy stick. You are then going to have to reformat the memory in the "brain". Put the unit in diagnostic mode by holding down the 1 and 5 buttons and then pressing play. The diagnostic mode should come up. If it doesn't, disconect the brain from the backpack, reinsert the brain and try again. In diagnostics, choose to select NAND Disk and then format NAND Disk. Don't worry about the warning message, the data on your hard drive won't be touched. Choose yes and when it is done, you should be back to normal.

quote:Originally posted by leftysue
[brWhat I want to do is get an external HD so I can keep my tunes on the hard drive for easy access. This way I don't have to keep everything on the Neuros. If I download and use "sorune", what do I need to do to transfer the music on my neuros mp3 to the Sorune? I was told by some that if I tried to sync my mp3 with another computer, it wouldn't be able to recognize the files. If you wouldn't mind talking me through this one, I'd be grateful. I want to get rid of the Neuros sync manager, save all the music on my neuros to an external HD via a software such as Sorune. What do I do? I want to back up my music in the event that the Neuros should crash. I'd like to copy all my music from the Neuros music folder to an external hard drive via , say, sorune. Again so I have my music on a HD on the PC and don't need to keep my Neuros totallly loaded. It will allow me to switch out more music, and still have easy access to it. Can you walk me through that in layman's terms. I really appreciate your guidance so far. I am so clse to understanding the basics of this. I appreciate your time and response. Mike ( Leftysue)]

iPods only allow you to sync to one computer as a form of copy protection. That doesn't apply to the Neuros.

You don't need to transfer music to Sorune. Sorune is simply a program that allows you to see the music on both your computer and Neuros, to transfer music from your computer to the Neuros and to build the Neuros' database. Sorune presents you with two windows. The left window  is a Windows Explorer like list of your hard drives and their contents. You can find your music just like you would in Explorer. The right window is a list of the music in your Neuros database.

I'm glad to see you have decided to switch to Sorune. I think that you will find that the interface will make it easier to understand how it all works. I will try to give your a layman's set of instructions to achieve your goals:

1. Buy your external hard drive and set it up with your computer.
2. Connect your Neuros to the computer.
3. Open My Computer. You should see your new drive listed under Hard Drives and your Neuros under removable storage. Double click on the new drive's icon.
4. Open another My Computer window and open the Neuros drive. You should see a folder named Music on the Neuros. Drag that folder to the new drive's window and all of your music will be copied there.
5. After copying is complete, open Sourne. You should be able to find your music on the new HD in the left window and see the music in your current Neuros database in the right window.
6. Create a fresh database on the Neuros by clicking on the Rebuild icon in Sorune. You don't have to do this, but it's a good idea.
7. Tell Sorune where your music is stored on your new HD by clicking on the Configuration Options icon. Under the General tab, click on browse next to Music Home and find your new music folder. At some point, click on Help to explore the options available for customizing your database on the Neuros.

To add music in the future:
1. Rip or copy your music to your new HD music folder.
2. Connect your Neuros and open Sorune.
3. Highlight the new music in the left window.
4. Click on the Add icon. The new music should now be marked for addition.
5. Click on the Synchronize icon. Your new music will be copied to the Neuros and the database will be updated.

I hope that this helps.

David Oostendorp

[[Can I do this, even if the downloaded data tracks aren't actually on the PC hard drive any more. They have been removed and saved on cdr as data?]]

You can easily control the location that WMP rips music to. Open WMP and select options under the tools menu. Click on the rip music tab and you will find the location you are currently savig ripped music to. To change the location to another folder or disk, just click on change and find or create the folder you want to save to. This can be on your main drive, or any external drive, including the Neuros. I don't like tying up my Nueros to rip, so I rip to my HD and the use Explorer to copy the files directly to the Neuros music folder. Then doing a sync with NDBM or Sorune quickly adds the files to the database. I would jettison the sync software that came with the Neuros and move to one of the other two if I were you.


[Can I do this, even if the downloaded data tracks aren't actually on the PC hard drive any more. They have been removed and saved on cdr as data?]

As far as the music you have transfered to cdr. Unless your Neuros crashes and you need to restore your files, you should never need to access your cdr disks again. As Chad said, complete versions of all of your music are stored on your Neuros. If you get an external HD or a new computer and want all of your music stored there as well as on your Neuros, just copy your entire music folder from the Neuros to the new drive. The fact that you moved them to cdr is irrelevent.

quote:Originally posted by SSA

Yeah reformating the NAND did the trick, what exactly does that do?

NAND refers to the type of flash memory that is used by the Nerous. It is located in the brain portion of the player. The programing that controls the Nerous is stored there. When it becomes corrupted for some reason, reformating reloads the needed files that are stored on the hard drive.

See the reply I left for leftysue and see if it helps.

The type of issues that you and SSA are experiencing are often resolved by reformating something called the NAND. For some reason they neglected to mention this easy fix in user guide. Start with your Neuros powered down. Hold down the 1 and 5 preset buttons while pressing the play button. A diagnosis screen will come up. Select "NAND Disk" followed by "Formant NAND Disk". You will get a warning that data will be permanently lost. Don't worry it won't do anything to your music files. Select "Yes" to format the NAND. When it is done, go back to the first screen and choose "Exit". The system may remain busy for a while. Try shutting down by holding the play button. Hopefully it will work now.

Now to address why the problem may have started in the first place. The very first time I sync'd my Nerous, I was not very careful about when I disconnected it. If you ever disconnect the USB cable durring a sync or if your computer goes into sleep mode while communicating with your Nerous, bad things happen and the NAND will need to be reformated. I had to reformat mine several times when I first got it. Since then, I always make sure I use the "safely remove hardware" feature in my system tray before disconnecting and I haven't had a problem since.

Finnaly, I fully agree with SSA on the use of Sorune. Let me know if this helped.

While you can't get rid of them from the all song list, you can make them less intrusive. You can rename the files with a tag editor. Add a ZZ (or ZZZ if you have any ZZ Top [])to the beginning of the name of each. They will then be clumped together at the end of the all song list, out of the way.

quote:Originally posted by alien04

That's interesting info. How many hours of play time do you get on a charge? Do you play it continuously? I have to recharge every third day, I play it for about 1.5hrs /day - so I'm getting less than 5 hrs of playtime per charge. Maybe time for new battery?

Maybe there is something a little dodgy about the indicator. Mine has always read 404 at a full charge and doesn't shut down until it reads about 345. I get 8-9 hours of headphone play on a charge.