The following page contains links to pages with Frequently Asked Questions of new technology that is supported by SEAL™ electronic products. Check below for new links to information that may help you understand your product, troubleshoot a problem with your product or use of your product better! If you have any questions or need assistance that you can not find here please email technical support at support@seal-usa.net

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• Disabling Driver Signing in Windows ME for Installation of Sound Card (e.g. Ssc-2) (02/27/2004)

  Q: If you are having problems installing your new sound card (ssc-2) in Windows ME due to Driver Signing errors follow the instructions below.

  A: Please understand there is no user interface to disable Driver Signing feature in Windows Me. This is default behavior. However, there is still the following Driver Signing registry key in Windows Me.

  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Driver Signing

  Regarding this, we are providing you with a registry file for you to import. Please save the attached Driver_Signing.exe on your Windows Me computer (default location is C:\Driver_Signing), double click to unzip it. After you see the Driver_Signing.reg, please double click to merge it.

  When you receive prompt, click Yes or OK to confirm.

  After you import the Driver_Signing.reg, restart your computer and try to install the sound card driver again.

  If you continue to have problems installing your new sound card on your Windows ME system or need assistance, email technical support at support@seal-usa.net.

• Disabling Integrated Sound built into the Motherboard FAQ (01/31/2004)

  Q: How do you disable integrated sound that is built into the motherboard?

  A: Disabling the sound can be done one of many ways.

  One way is to disable the device drivers in your Device Manager that corresponds to your motherboard's sound. These drivers should be located in the 'Sound, Video, and Game Controllers' section of Device Manager.

  Another way is to enter your system SETUP and change the BIOS settings. A word of caution: making changes to your system BIOS improperly may result in incorrect operation of your computer. When your computer first turns on, it normally gives a message that says something like "Press ____ to enter Setup". It is the key configuration ____ that you will need to press to enter your system's setup. While there you should be able to locate 'Onboard/Integrated Device' and 'Sound' should be close by. It should only have two options -- Enable and Disable.

  You can also pseudo-disable the on-board sound by making your current sound card the prefered playback device that windows uses to play sound. By doing this the computer will use the device drivers of your new card and will ignore the on-board drivers. This can be done through the 'Sounds and Multimedia' or just 'Multimedia' section of 'Control Panel'. In this section you should see an 'Audio' tab. In the 'Audio' section there is a place where the 'Prefered Playback Device' is selected. Make sure that it's the drivers that correspond to your SEAL sound card and not your on-board sound drivers.

• Installing Ssc-2 on Windows XP FAQ (01/31/2004)

  Q: How do I know if the Ssc-2 sound card was installed on Windows XP?

  A: Windows XP is usually pretty good at installing the SSC-2 automatically, and you may have never even noticed it.

  You can see if this is the case by going to your system's Device Manager and seeing if you have any Crystal Audio Controllers or CS4281 drivers installed under the Sound, Video and Game Controllers section. If you notice these drivers installed and they don't have any yellow ?'s or !'s or red x's next to them, then the card is installed correctly.

• Compatible Speakers with SEAL Sound Cards FAQ (01/31/2004)

  Q: How do I know if my speakers are compatible with SEAL's sound card?

  A: If your card still does not function properly, it may be because your computer speakers are not an Active set of speakers. An Active set of speakers has their own power supply, on/off button, and volume control. These speakers are designed to be independently amplified and require no amplification from a sound card, whereas speakers designed for built-in on-board motherboard sound are usually designed to be amplified by the computer/sound card and will not work to produce adequate volumes of sound with our card. If your card is functioning correctly, and you have an unActive set of speakers, you will only hear very very faint sounds.

• Sfp-150 and Sfp-190 Supported File Types FAQ (01/27/2004)

  Q: Can you copy directly from your music CDs onto your Sfp-150 or Sfp-190 MP3/WMA player?

  A: The Seal product you purchased is a portable WMA/MP3 player. This means that the files on your audio CDs cannot be directly copied to the player as they are of the CDA file format.

  This means you will have to use another application to 'rip' the CDA content off your CDs and put it into a format that can be read by the player (MP3/WMA). There are several programs on the net that are free and allow you to do such things. The Windows Media Player 9 Series has a 'Copy CD' section that will write the tracks on the disc to WMA files on your computer, then you can transfer the files onto your player. You can even create the WMA files and have them placed directly on your player while your're doing it.

  Your player also gives you the capability to drag and drop or copy and paste already made MP3s and WMAs onto it.

  WMA files purchased off the net are wrapped with DRM protection and will need to be downloaded to the player using Windows Media Player or the application that was used to purchase the software, i.e. Napster. For more information on DRM, check it out on the FAQs section at www.seal-usa.net/FAQ/faq_windows_media_drm.htm. Before transferring audio files that may be wrapped in DRM protection, obtain the newest firmware for your player from our web page.

  If you need assistance installing the new firmware, refer to your owner's manual or check out our FAQs section at www.seal-usa.net/FAQ/faq_firmware_upgrade.htm.

• Sfp -150 and Sfp-190 Firmware Upgrade/Download/Reset How To (01/26/2004)

  Q: If you are having problems with the playing of your sfp-150 or sfp-190 player you may need to follow the steps to reinstall the firmware.

  A: Try downloading the most current firmware from our website and installing it, but first remove the old upgrade manager from your machine using the uninstall option located: <Start> --> <Program Files> --> <SigmaTel MSCN> --> <Uninstall>

  Then install the new firware upgrade manager and upgrade the firmware from <Start> --> <Program Files> --> <SigmaTel MSCN> --> <Firmware Download>

  If this doesn't resolve the issue, try resetting the firmware by holding the play/pause button for 5 sec, plugging it into your machine, and releasing the play/pause button only after you see that your machine has installed something, or after 10 sec.

  You should see a 'Recovery Device' listed in the Device Manager, if you do not, stop the USB connected player using windows, remove the player from the computer, and try again.

  Once successful, run the firmware download program again.

• Sfp-150 and Sfp-190 Storage Space and Play Time FAQ (01/26/2004)

  Q: Why does the sfp-150 and sfp-190 hold less than 128 MB of music when it says is is supposed to hold 128 MB?

  A: The amount of free space that is registered is dependent on the application that is calculating it. Almost every application varies in the way that bytes are calculated and one important thing is that bytes and bits are not decimal calculations but binary calculations.

  This can most easily be seen with your hard drive. Let's say you purchase a computer with a hard drive that was advertised as having 30 GB of space, but when you look it up in Windows, it only shows 28.2 GB of capacity.

  For example, I purchased a 100 GB hard drive. Windows says that it only has 93.1 GB available, but right next to it, you see 100,...,...,... bytes. Taking these bytes and doing an incorrect decimal conversion would yield 100 GB, but this is incorrect, because you are mixing decimal conversion with binary numbers.

  When hooking up the SFP-150 to a Windows 2000 machine, it registers as 122 MB and right next to it 128,155,648 bytes. Again, doing a decimal conversion comes to 128 MB. It's just the way all storage hardware manufacturers do it.

  For more information on the decimal/binary conversions, this link will provide you with the correct numbers.

  http://www.acersupport.com/notebook/articles/tm340_hddsize.html

  
  Q: Why does it say the sfp-150 can hold up to 4 hours of play time but my player only holds 2 hours or 3 hours, etc?

  A: The amount of hours in music that you can put on the player is dependent on the encoding scheme you use. MP3s are different from WMAs and if encoded in different ways will result in different hours of music being able to be loaded onto each player.

  If one song is 3 min long, but it's encoded with such high quality that it takes up the space of the entire player, then the total music on the player will only be 3 min.

  But if that same song is encoded with lower quality such that it only takes up half of the space on the player, then you could put 2 of those songs on the player, resulting in 6 min of music.

  Of course these figures are a dramatization, but the idea is that the higher quality songs will take up more space and result in less capacity for other songs on the player which results in less music time to be played. Check out the next question on more of an explanation of how encoding schemes and quality effect play time.

  
  Q: How to the different encoding schemes calculate into the total hours of music I can fit onto my player?

  A: MP3's and WMA's both have different encoding schemes. But the options for encoding them should be the same, i.e. 128 kilo bits/sec (kbps) or 256 kbps or 64 kbps. The key here is that the higher the sampling rate, the more bits required to represent that sample and hence the larger the song file for a given amount of music.

  Doing the math, 4 hours of music is 4 * 3600 = 14400 seconds. Assuming the player has 128x10^6 bytes available, which is different than 128 MB since this isn't a binary representation, thats 8*128x10^6 bits = 1024x10^6 bits. In order to get 4 hours of music on your player you would have to encode the files at 1024x10^6 bits / 14400 seconds = 71111.11 bits/sec or about 71.11 kilo bits/sec.

  So, the idea here is, lower the bit rate that you sample/encode your music files in, and you'll get more music on your player because the files will be smaller allowing for more songs on the player, resulting in more music time.

  Most software should support a min of 64 kbps allowing for at least 4 hours of play time on your player. If
  WMA's can't do this, try MP3's that can be sampled this low.

• Windows Media DRM FAQ (01/02/2004)

  Question:

  How does WMA DRM work?

  Answer:

  Links to Tutorials

  http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/wm7/drm/tutorial.aspx

  Common Questions/Scenarios

  What happens if you copy a DRM file (a file ripped with protection option enabled in Windows Media Player) and copy this file to the portable player using Windows Explorer?

  Because the file was transferred to the portable player without using WMDM, the license information is not tied to the PMID and still represents the information for the PC on which it was ripped. In other words, you cannot play this file on your portable player. However, because the file does not have the rights transcribed for the portable device and still represents the rights for the PC, you can play the file on the PC using Windows Media Player, when you enumerate the drives and try to play the files on the PC with the removable media as an enumerated drive.

  Can you use any other Download software to transfer a DRM file to the portable media?

  You can. As long as the Download software uses WMDM, the rights will be transcribed for the portable media and you will be able to play this file. This, of course, is subject to the condition, that you have the rights to transfer a DRM file to the portable media in the first place. If your download software does not use WMDM, the license information won’t be converted to DRM PD and you cannot play the file. It will be necessary to use WMDM APIs to support these. The SDK is available from Microsoft to allow download software other than WMP to transcribe files to DRM-PD.

  What happens if you try to copy a DRM file that you ripped from a CD to a portable player, which does not support DRM and using WMP?

  If the file you rip from the CD with protection option enabled is transferred to the portable device which does not support DRM, the WMP strips out the license information and allows you to play this file. This is possible, because the player is aware that the rights for the song are still valid on the particular PC and therefore can be conferred to the Portable device. This is the only instance, where the protection is bypassed. For a given computer, the security level is lower and DRM is bypassed. However, the same is not true for a DRM song downloaded from the web, or DRM song ripped on other computers, because the rights are no longer available for that particular PC from where you transfer the content to the player.

  Should non-DRM players return a serial number when queried by the host?

  No. If a valid serial number is returned, the WMP (or any other download software supporting WMDM) assumes that the player supports DRM; so, if the transferred file is DRM (v1, v7) on the PC, it will be transcribed to DRM-PD and tied to the serial number of the portable media. Clearly such a file cannot be played on the player that does not have DRM-PD implemented on the player.

  What happens if you try to play a DRM file, on a non-DRM STMP341x player?

  The default action is to stop playing this file and proceed to the next song in the play-list.

  What happens if you try to play a DRM file, which does not have the rights for the particular DRM player?

  The default action is to stop playing this file and proceed to next song in the play-list.

  What is the .lic file automatically created when I transfer DRM content to the player?

  The .lic file is not required for DRM-PD. On portable media, the license information is built in as a part of the DRM file as an ASF object. This is because the file has a format for DRM-PD. The .lic file is not used.

  Because the security is based on the serial number, is it necessary to hide the serial number of the device?

  The protection is tied to the serial number of media, but it is not dependent upon the knowledge of the serial number (part of SDMI specifications). However, it is absolutely necessary that the serial number be read-only and it should not be possible to change this in any way.

  Microsoft regularly updates DRM to provide new rights; for instance, provision for limited play or content expiry after a certain period… does the device support this?

  The upgraded technology for these rights is so far available only on PC platforms. The ported technology for STMP341x is DRM-PD, which is used for portable devices, which is different. This does not support content expiry by any means. Microsoft is currently upgrading their DRM-PD technology for portable devices to provide additional rights.