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sfbp

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Everything posted by sfbp

  1. sfbp

    Track marks

    Well no; but I seem to get a lot of hum loops (generally on other equipment), since our mains power is so bad (old house, no ground on the sockets which the stereo is on) - optical seems a great way to avoid this. So far, so good. I find the analog level sync doesn't work at all. Funny but I couldn't find that feature in the manual. Until recently I did most non-miked recordings on a deck, so the problem never arose.
  2. sfbp

    Track marks

    Sorry to answer my own post but I found that cutting off the digital signal for more than 2 seconds worked quite well. To do this I simply pressed "stop" on the MD deck, and then the record again to turn on D->A once more. I'm a bit surprised, given that the SS software will play a track for you, that you cannot do the seek using the slider bar, and then press track mark on the recorder. But I'm sure there's some good reason why you cannot. I'd still like to know about whether you can do the careful editing easily with a HiMD deck. Added much later: I stumbled upon how to skip forward fast in a long track. If you pause it first during playback, holding the fast forward key now RACES through the recorded sound (no samples, but you cannot have everything) and easy to get to where you want. Congratulations, Sony!
  3. sfbp

    Track marks

    Well I did my first non-live recording into HiMD today. Thereby hangs a tale of sorts - we recently lost most of the programming that the audience actually wants, on CBC Radio 2, about a week ago. Sunday appears to be one of the only holdouts, so I attempted to record a couple of shows that I really like, off the air. To do this, I wired up my MD deck to act as A->D (input being FM radio) and then fed the optical output into my NH600. I had to use HiMD because LP2 doesn't cut it and 80 minutes wasn't enough since I was going to be gone for most of the broadcast, and couldn't change the disk. Obviously I wanted to divide it up into tracks, and delete the guff that I didn't want out of the 8 hours of music. Problem #1: Digital recording won't let me insert track marks whilst recording Problem #2: you cannot put track marks automatically when digitally recording. Problem #3: to fast forward through an hour at a time is way too tedious, it goes about x10 but there is no way like on the SP decks to move the divide point by large amounts. Here's the question: a. Has anyone found a clever way to do this? I figured one trick might be to record a short track on the END, then fast backward through the track mark to cut off the last 5 minutes of the long track. b. Does the HiMD deck from Onkyo get around this, and allow fast editing? Interesting aside: the fact that I can split a digital track AT ALL means that there is nothing terribly clever about how they are protecting the sounds (see several other threads about this, if I have energy I will crosslink them later). Stephen
  4. Something new: maybe we are all doing this without thinking about it. If you pause the recorder while recording, a track mark is added. You can do this from the remote. I noticed this in the NF610 manual but I just tried it out on the RH1. So the only thing you have to do on the recorder itself is the initial RECORD action. But marking in playback only happens with the button on the recorder itself. I have four different remotes and none has a Tmark button.
  5. My (bitter) experience of recording (and dealing with it afterwards) is that the automatic marking is the better option. a. if you are making any sort of stealth recording b. if you misjudge the divide point You are really screwed if you make the tracks too long (either wear out the jog lever, or spend hours in front of SS , not even an option if you don't have the RH1). Better to have them every 10 mins (or your choice) and press "record" again to force a new mark. (Edit: I got confused - this is the procedure on a deck, on a portable recorder the way is to press pause twice - see next post) If it's SP then you don't care as the facilities for editing are far better on a deck. (Again, assuming you don't have the Onkyo HiMD deck, but it's not clear from the architecture of HiMD whether easy division of tracks is even possible without a computer to reencode the file).
  6. I looked at the manual too. You can only do track mark when recording. The function of the TM button when playing back, is quite different, it has to do with cancelling a MOVE. Odd, that.
  7. Yeah, took me a while to notice that the unencrypted ones get renamed to .OMA (from the original .oma). The most helpful trick someone else pointed out is to add a column in SS with the File Name (just rightclick the column head). This will show you EXACTLY which files are encrypted (assuming that you don't have extension display always on - I haven't actually tried dumbing it down to "hide file extensions of registered types" in years). Stephen
  8. Dump it. It's very likely causing a huge amount of wear on all the mechanics, esp. the playback head, of the disk mechanism.
  9. I think that SP->PCM->SP should be just fine. Good luck!
  10. The feature on all decks and now (only recently) some of the high MD units (eg the RH1, I haven't looked at the other ones) that allows you to divide a track where you want by moving the divide point BEFORE you make the actual mark. This involves playing 3 seconds or so of what comes after the divide point, which can be (at least on the decks) specified down to a 4 millisecond "frame". Wow that's interesting that the R37, R50 and R55 allow you to do trackmarking from the remote. I wonder why Sony took out that feature? Maybe it was too easy to make a mistake.......
  11. Bump... I am still interested and willing to analyze the "depends" log if someone will read this thread and send me the log showing where Vista crashes. Or maybe everyone got it working? Or abandoned Vista? Stephen
  12. Has anyone (other than myself) correlated ear problems with the HD-digital amps? I purchased the RH1 in the middle of 2007 and within a month got a severe attack of tinnitus, which I had never suffered before. I am not 100% sure but something different about the sound from this unit compared to all the others, bothers my ears. Dynamic normalization makes it sound less boring and I suspect that (turning on D-norm) is when my ears started to act up. Your comment about the soft sound rings many bells. I finally got my R91, and what I noticed was that during silence my ears actually rested. Somehow with the RH1, this didn't happen. It's ok now, as I keep my RH1 for recording and/or uploads, and use the NH600 when I want to listen to a HiMD disc.
  13. I'd suggest running some Nero drive data/music extraction tests, if you have Nero. I'm wondering if something reorganised your drivers for the CDROM? You'll have to find the device map (turn on "show hidden devices") and have a look and see if anything looks odd. If I had to guess, I'd say the mapping of physical driver to letter is messed up. Get rid of the CD, and delete anything that looks right for CD in the device map. Reconnect the CD drive, and see if that doesn't fix it. Probably right to reboot after deinstalling it. If there's configuration for SB, it will be stored in (maybe) an ini file or (more likely) the registry. Someone here must know this already. Maybe you have to clean that configuration up, assuming there really is no hardware error. But if you have a spare drive I would be inclined to swap it in. Can your CD read data as well as music?
  14. (obvious) question: does the CD drive play music and DVDs without reference to Sony/SonicStage/MD? Note that reading DVD and reading CD is accomplished by two different lasers, and ONE of them may be bust. At least, that's what happened to me. Drives are cheap now, likely replacing the drive is the answer.
  15. I had this problem when I got my R91, used. Open the battery door and clean the contacts of both battery and door. In my case you could see it had gone green from copper oxidation. You might want to get some specialised contact cleaner from an electronics shop.
  16. LP is not the same as monaural. The R70 will play 160 mins of mono, but it will not do 160 minutes of MDLP. Sorry. You need to look in the browser http://www.minidisc.org/equipment_browser.html and see if there are the magic letters MDLP. The R900 was the first portable recorder in the list that supported LP, they are in order. So the R900 happens to be the next one after yours, making yours roughly the last not to support MDLP. Bad luck. It says "LP" in the display because Sony rigged it to do that rather than playing digital noise.
  17. The only upconversion thought to be safe is 292kbps (Atrac SP) to 1411Khz (PCM/WAV). This is because Atrac was specifically designed to do this. Since your tracks off CD started out as 1411, I suggest you get them from the CD again. It seems common ground that for *most purposes* 256 is "good enough" for the HiMD format. (some purists insist on PCM, but if you can't tell, then why worry?).
  18. Didn't someone just mention that one of the Sharp units does? I don't recall which one, and I don't own any. Something to check out, though.
  19. I see no reason why it should be compressed at all. When SP is played back, the output is 1411kbps CD/.WAV format. So compressing it and uncompressing it is simply not on the menu. I don't totally trust the A-to-D on some of the lower-end mobile minidiscs. But I use this to record a digital signal into them when I need more than I can get on a single SP disc.
  20. You can play back SP on any MD ever made. Probably silver gets marked easier. I was really annoyed to find my silver NF810 got a scuff on the O of Sony, just from being in my shirt pocket.
  21. I am only guessing but I would think not, as the D usually refers to "Downloader" Looking on the specs this is confirmed as NOT being one of the features. If you want to get SP via optical in suggest you get something like an MZ-R91 or R90.
  22. Interesting question. I spotted these a while back, and there are obviously crates of them at this one company. They don't show anywhere on the minidisc.org equipment browser (please correct me if I'm wrong) but they look like reasonably featured units. They seem to change hands under $30 so why not give it a whirl?
  23. There seem to be a fair number of HiMD units (and NetMD too) available on ebay.co.uk Problem is, most of them refuse to ship outside the UK. How to educate these sellers that there is a worldwide market out there? I was ok, I picked up a used NH700 (from a private seller) for about $50 using a relative's account. There is one company that is selling what *looks* like lots of them as a boxed item (I am guessing, they have disclaimers saying unit is B+ whatever that means), for $90 or so. So I guess the diehards here need to make friends with the Brit members of our forum........ Just thought you'd like to know.
  24. What do you see every time you go to the movies? A reiteration of the Dolby patent. The movie lobby is the big bucks here, Sony Pictures or not - I am betting that Dolby wouldn't move an inch.
  25. I think LP2 + Type-S does it for you, on the pre-HiMD units. I fix most of my sound recordings up while they are wave files, including normalizing (ie increasing gain) before I ever show them to SS. CD's direct to LP2 sound amazing. And it's all in the playback Codec, IMO.
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