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This video by "Spare Time Repair" popped up in my YouTube feed this morning. Thought it might be of interest to some people here 🙂

Hello everyone ! Have been struggling with a MZ-N910 that reads discs perfectly, but is unable to record. Symptoms are the following: - in analog input mode, the recording starts but after 1min or so it throws REC ERR error; - in netMD mode, the recording starts but progress remains stuck; - spindle speed can be heard going constantly up and down, like a CD player struggling to read the disc; After lubricating the spindle motor (watch oil), I managed to get a full disc recording when unit sat upside down. However was unable to consistently reproduce this behavior. Before lubricating the spindle motor, unit was also throwing a MEM OVER error which has disappeared now. Checking the unit for stored errors, I found this (see picture attached). However after clearing the errors, they do not re-appear.

Not at all. This is all useful information for those, like me, that only have one point of reference for the behaviour of the NiMH gumsticks in their players. Hmm. If the charger is charging it up to somewhere around normal levels and then it's dropping by itself then it may be done for. You'd have to check with a meter what happens when it's charging. A bench power supply can be used for more advanced manual charging methods also (but you really need to do research on that to ensure you don't cause the battery to overheat). A deep discharge plus charge up again might sort it out but 0.9v is already considered about empty for a NiMH cell. Whether it can deliver any meaningful current might be more telling, but you'd have to find something to load it down to test (at a reasonable current, say 100-300mA). A few years ago I posted a thread about contolling it over the serial port to add track markers if you want to see some serial command nerding. It also contains a block-quote with some background information on it. At the time it was when the whole Web Minidisc stuff was kicking off, and I esentially abandoned that whole idea right away. Also because it's an older ATRAC version, it might be a fancy broadcast deck, but the reality is the recordings sound shit compared to any Type R portable. It's my main living room player though, so it's in frequent use. Because it's intended for broadcast it responds almost instantly to anything, including spitting the disc out without delay, and has chunky buttons, so I really enjoy the tactile nature of it compared to more consumer decks. It gets an outing every year at a large cybersecurity conference where it's used in an area as a public-facing background music player with a selection of discs next to it for people to swap between throughout the event (or I swap them when I notice the same disc has been playing for a long time). I made a Raspberry Pi based display that uses the info from the serial port to show what the last tracks and discs were to be played. The script is a complete hack and is available on GitHub. You know what, that really deserves a thread all of its own (later, I need to go to work!)...