Leaderboard

Yeah, I really don't fancy my chances of getting it back together again if I tried to dissemble it. Everything's so tiny compared to working on a deck. I got a bit annoyed with it yesterday 🤦‍♂️ and gave the jog dial a pretty vigorous work out and it seems to have improved a fair bit 🤣 I think I'll just keep playing with it for a while longer and see how things pan out.

OK well finally back with a report of success with the Drive B encoder. Did the connection reversal for pins A and B of the encoder (1 and 3 on the PCB diagram from the service manual). No need to cut the tracks as both solder ring pads had been lost but I still had to undo the track repair. Also, in the process of de-soldering the encoder for the nth time, the solder pad for pin 4 also came off, so had to make a new bridge connection for that. Another figure of the rather messy repair: hairs on the area were from cotton buds during cleanup. Pink stuff is nail varnish remaining from the earlier track repair. Anyway after covering the area with Kapton tape and reassembling the rewired PCB back into the front panel, all functions of the encoder were exactly as anticipated (clockwise + counter clockwise) and the push-button switch works fine. Earlier worries about the amount of force needed to push the switch were allayed and it is not so forceful as to move the whole deck. With the above success I revisited the left-sided encoder (Drive A) of the W1 and rewired it according to the principle above, which is a much more solid repair as all the legs can be soldered to the board and the bridge wires added. It's a different wiring layout, which I can include in a repair section of the MD Wiki as requested. Thanks everyone, especially of course @kgallen for all the advice.

No, you aren't missing anything obvious. NetMD doesn't support putting raw ATRAC1 back on the discs. However, if you would like to test it, here's the unreleased version of WMD, which does support that on some devices: https://testing.minidisc.wiki/b0824780-3c0c-11ed-b994-2c56dc399093/ That is a bug I am aware of, I'll fix it as soon as possible. It's still not fixed in the testing version I linked above.

@BearBoy - Yes - there's a difference. ATRAC3 data is stored in WAV, because the RIFF container (the specification that WAV files follow) allow that to happen. For ATRAC1 I couldn't go with WAV, since ATRAC1 isn't supported by the RIFF container. Instead WMD downloads these files as AEA (an old format that was created by MD Editor I think). Sir68k - another developer of netmd-exploits managed to add the ATRAC1 specification to the matroska file format, and we'll probably also try to do the same with ATRAC3, so that the container format will be unified. I'll soon publish a patch to FFMPEG which patch the matroska demuxer there. AEA files are terrible because it's hard to identify them - they don't have a "magic number", unlike WAVs, so the sooner we switch from them the better.