Leaderboard

This was just something I noticed during various messings about and I thought it was worth sharing. I have no idea if it has been mentioned before. It concerns the transfer rates of NetMD. I don't know if minidisc.org is the most up to date with its information but it states: "SP mode audio at 1.6x is 2.25Mbps (i.e. 1411.2kbps*1.6)" However, I think this is incorrect. It does also go on to say "perhaps driver or interface problems that restrict NetMD USB transfers to roughly 2.5Mbps really are limiting the speed of SP mode transfers" and says that USB 2.0 could help but so would fixing whatever the USB 1.1 problem is. I couldn't tell you if this has been fixed, but just from what I've noticed, I don't think the 1.6x is right. When you cue a song to play at 1.6x and start it at the same time as an SP NetMD transfer begins, the transfer is over well before the song is. I also noticed that SonicStage transfers finish at 95%. Once there, it will do one of two things: If you are transferring using battery power, it will stop and write TOC information before continuing with the next song. You can hear this happening on the device itself, since the whole laser/recording aperture is quite audible when going back and forth. If you are transferring with the power supply, it will simply finish at 95% and then continue with the next song. The TOC information is written after everything else is finished. Again the noise from the device confirms this, the laser isn't going back and forth between songs, it is just a continuous process until the end. So with that in mind, I figured I would speed up the music a tad to. 2.0x. I started the music at the same time as the transfer started and it was certainly a lot closer, but the music finished a tiny bit ahead of the transfer, so I slowed the music down to 1.9x. Both finished at exactly the same time, and this was tested a few times with a few different songs of varying length. Which leads me to a few possibilities. The problem that was mentioned by minidisc.org (being restricted to a certain bandwidth) has been fixed, or the use of USB 2.0 actually helps. But then I could still be wrong, since I use a 64-bit driver. I don't know how much it differs over the 32-bit one that comes with SonicStage. Anywho, just thought they were observations worth sharing.