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Hello! Just thought I'll report it here, if you're trying to create an account without a connection with an already existing account like Google or alike, it's simply impossible to do so, because of incorrectly loaded reCaptcha. To make this account I had to rewrite the part of the site responsible for the captcha. If anyone else is experiencing the same difficulties, here are the steps I used to create my account: Go to https://forums.sonyinsider.com/register/ In devtools, open the `head` tag and remove all the scripts that mention recaptcha Add a new script, with `src="https://www.google.com/recaptcha/api.js"` Execute the following JavaScript code: const captcha = document.querySelector("[data-ipscaptcha]"); const parent = captcha.parentElement; captcha.remove(); const newCaptcha = document.createElement("div"); parent.appendChild(newCaptcha); grecaptcha.ready(() => grecaptcha.render(newCaptcha, {sitekey: "6LdgERMTAAAAAC4kTmm7BH1laShX3teATAV_6FIY"})); After that, you should be able to click on the captcha and create your account by executing the following JS code (the submit button is broken): document.querySelector("form").submit();

Don't worry about it - I got myself a Sony LAM for testing and ended up falling in love with the whole LAM series of devices. I have 3 now, so I use that functionality regularly 😆

Over the past couple of months, I've been bitten by the MD bug again. I hadn't visited this forum in a VERY long time. I've used one of my MZ-NH900s at my work desk on almost a daily basis for 10+ years. It sits it's original cradle, powered from the AC adapter because the battery long since gave up the ghost. I have about 20 disc's (a mix of Hi-MD and standard MD My other NH900 has been broken for years after it fell out of my pocket and a disc got jammed. Was able to get the disc out by disassembling the recorder but when I all went back together the buttons were no longer responsive... So I put it in a storage box with my other MD stuff that wasn't used anymore. FF 1month ago, I was digging thru some things and came across my box MD recorders. Pulled out the NH900 and took it apart again. Long story short, it's had been returned to service! While looking for info on repair, I came across this site and an intro to Reddit MD. My interest stoked again, burned some new disc's, reorganized some of my favorites, and am trying my hand at labeling. I've also managed to buy a couple of new Hi-MD blanks and some used standard MDs. It's always fun to go thru used disc's from someone else to see what's on them 🙂 My MD arsenal consists of: MZ-R500, MZ-N707 (eprom nodded), MZ-N920, IM-DR420, MZ-NH600D, 2-MZ-NH900s, 2-MZ-RH10s (both with bad displays), and a MZ-RH910. 150ish standard MDs and 15 Hi-MDs. Most of my standard disc's are Hi-MD formated and most of the music is burned in ATRAC3plus @256k. I simply LOVE this format!

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.

Thanks - well there has been some good progress. The low profile encoder fits great and allows the PCB to be replaced properly in the front panel, without any stress on it or the other switches. Also, the plastic AMS knob fits better on the shaft and no filing is needed to get it on (or off). Reconnected the ribbons and wires, powered on the deck and it works! Rotating the dial moves through tracks on MDs, and the push-on switch plays the track. In the menu the rotation similarly moves back and forth through the options, and the push-on selects the one arrowed. However, going forward through the numbered tracks on an MD, or going through the menu options is via an anticlockwise rotation, whereas it should be clockwise (checked on a working MDS-W1 deck). I don't know enough electronics to understand if this can be corrected, say by swapping the pins of the A and B contacts where they are soldered to the board (see 'quadrature output table' in previous post, lower left hand diagram, where I presume CW and CCW are the rotation actions). Would anyone be able to suggest a way of reversing the current action?

We’re a terrible influence on each other 🤣

And they arrived from Japan this morning. Time to get recording 🙂

That's not really the case - Zadig is used to install the libusb driver, that makes it possible for Chrome to access the USB devices. Sony driver (the one used for SonicStage) locks the NetMD device down - it makes it unavailable for other apps to use. It's still necessary to use Zadig (or a 32-bit libusb driver in general) to run Web Minidisc on a 32-bit Windows system.

The MDW80Ts seem to drift in and out of stock at Amazon.co.jp, at least as far as sellers prepared to ship to the UK are concerned. Noticed they were back in stock today so placed an order. Worked out at £2.93 per disc including delivery. Must. Stop. Buying. More. Blanks. 🤦‍♂️ These also popped up whilst I was looking around the site: https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/Recording-80-Minutes-Piece-3mdw80rh-Original/dp/B016QJJVOO/ Reminded me of some of the artist MDs that @Richard posted recently. Not sure if "Red Hot" were a Japanese band or whether the photo card is for something completely different.

Hi! Thanks for the kind words, if you have any suggestions or bugs to report, please let me know :). I got into MD for the first time in 2016 thanks to the first Techmoan MD video ("Minidisc: An appreciation" I think it was called), when I got myself an MZ-R3, that died a few years later with error 40. Now I own 5 MZ-R3s - 1 working and 4 dead. If you know any fixes for that dreaded error 40, please let me know - I'd love to fix it one day.

Hello @asivery. Welcome to the forum! Just wanted to say a huge thanks to you and @cybercase (Stefano) for the amazing work you've done with Web MiniDisc and Web MiniDisc Pro. It's been a real game changer for me and it's great to see you've continued to develop it, enabling transfer of recordings from MDs to a PC without needing an MZ-RH1 and the improved ATRAC3 encoder. When I started getting back into MiniDisc around 2015, I never thought I'd see people bringing the format back to life in the way that things like Web MiniDisc have. Fantastic 👍

My daughter would love that 😀. Although I think she'd be somewhat baffled by the discs you have to put in it to get any sound 🤣 "Why won't this Alexa do what I tell it?" Impressed they went as far as moulding the Hello Kitty lid, rather than just using a graphic.

Good luck with the shows 🙂

That's worked for me too, thanks @Richard. In case anyone is like me and didn't know how to clear the data for an individual site in Chrome, I found some instructions here: https://www.howtogeek.com/664912/how-to-clear-storage-and-site-data-for-a-single-site-on-google-chrome/

Your MZ-N510 or MZ-NF610 should do the job! There's a good guide to setting things up on the Wiki: https://www.minidisc.wiki/guides/webminidisc Good luck! And shout if you get stuck.

Just remembered this isn't the case as I bought an MDS-JE480 a few months back. No remote and a bit scruffy looking but I was only after the MDM-7S1A drive as a donor for an MDS-JB980 with a persistent C13 issue. Had an initial set back as the 480 threw up a C13 error and then refused to eject the disc I had put in it to test it worked but after a quick belt swap it seemed to be in good working order. A check in the service menus showed the 480 had far fewer "miles" on the clock than the 980 (21 rec/119 playback vs 108 rec/536 playback) so hopefully it'll have a fair bit of life left in it. Swapping the drive unit over was straightforward enough (had a bit of advice/moral support from @kgallen 👍) - almost a direct swap, although the drive in the 980 had an additional earth wire so I connected that to the donor drive as well, and I am now back up to a full complement of working 980s 🙂

It's a couple of months later (and more) since I ran the the E10 direct to my my Kanto TUK powereds. Since then, I have added a Cambridge Audio DACMagic 100 to the mix. It has a Wolfson WM8742 chip for its DAC, and I have the E10 connected to it via coax. For me, at least, the DM100 exceeds both the E10's AK4524 and the TUK's own DSP in how it sounds. Yes, MD decks have long been renowned for their DACs, but this is a new level of detail I'm hearing. (I'm allowing for the TUK's AMT tweeters.)

I have used them both ways, CD > MD & MD > CD, the latter to enable ripping the result into iTunes. This was a project that took about two years. I even have a folder in iTunes devoted to that effort: "MD/CD Heaven." The editing abilities of minidisc completely surpass those of CD, where there isn't much you can do post-recording.

Here are a couple of snaps:

Trigger pulled:

Nice looking machine. In which dimension is it 2 inches bigger than normal hi-fi?

Nice set up @fourbanks 🙂

Great that you've got your machine working again, @multiwirth 🙂 Gerry also sells stuff like this via the r/minidisc Reddit under the name gerry88inHongKong (in case anyone's interested but doesn't use Facebook):

422702501 This has been a very long journey. Trying to get a stupid little “rubber band”. One of the biggest break throughs was the posting on this thread what the actual sony part number is. 4-227-025-01 I swam through a sea of wasted purchases from sellers around the world with generic pictures of belts regardless if it was “the one” for the mds e12 or jb940. I waited for postage to arrive only to be disappointed at big-ole thick belts of varying diameter. I made calls, I drove to small repair shops, I was told by electronic repair facilities md decks are not worth the money to repair them. mdm-7 drives use this little belt to load. When the disc does not load properly you get a read error or a c-13. The disc will not eject in some cases, or it spits it back out in others. Between the 22 pro + consumer decks, car decks and portables I own. Along with the hundreds upon hundreds of discs I have recorded, I am not about to give up because they say they are not worth fixing. Today my six pack of belts arrived from; www.partsdistribution.com in denver colorado. They are genuine sony belts repackaged for uniformity. They are the real thing and they work like there was never a loading problem in the first place. Having the real part number opened up a wider range of possabilities. Amazon listes them, but are out of stock. Walmart lists them but are out of stock. Electronic parts distributers list them as discontinued. Using google search, armed with a real part number, I found partsditribution.com I needed 6, I bought 6. Now I can begin the easier task of extracting the e-12’s currently running on true rubber bands bought from the $ store. Then the more difficult job of extracting two 940’s from my work station. And while I am at it, a belt replacement pack goes the tc-we835 cassette with eject failure. my hair is already grey, so my face turned blue instead. We can call this saga over. But the number 422702501 should be a header at the top of everyone’s post just to make sure no one else goes through hell and back for rubber bands. pictures... An aray of used and new belts. My work station with the 940’s. A four belt pack for the cassette. Other than to save money, why would sony change from the robust gear driven mechanism of the 930 to a tiny little belt? I don’t know.

Sorry about the long hiatus, moved locations and all. The update on the KMS-262 is that it is necessary for the combo units as it can heat the disc faster in the high speed dubbing mode. KMS-260 just for the regular decks and real-time play or record.

Here's what I've found. Keep in mind that for at-home use, I listen to MD almost exclusively through an MD deck attached to an amplifier via the deck's analog outputs. Everyone means well, I know, as far as how to get the best sound out of MD, but the configuration I just described is what I have and will stay as it is for the foreseeable future. One of my two main listening systems has, for an amp, the Cambridge Audio Azur 540R V3. This is a "modern" amp (that is, it has an optical in), although a few years old. At the moment, I'm using my JB930 as MD input to the amp, via analog, but for a couple of years prior, my JB940 was the MD source. The JB940 sounded pretty much the same no matter if connected to the amp via its analog out or via its digital out. I don't know what kind of DAC the 540R amp uses, but given the general high quality of Cambridge Audio gear, I would suspect it's pretty good. Perhaps if I tried using my MXD-D400 as input to the amp, I'd notice more of a difference in sound via the D400's optical out as compared to its analog out. (The D400, like its predecessor MXD-D40, is really rather woefully deficient as a playback unit via analog out.) Should my NAD C372 amp (the amp for my other - and primary - main system) ever fail, or should I ever find myself with a surplus of funds, then I'd consider replacing it with a similar unit that does have optical in. That could give me more options for MD sourcing. Anyway, I just wanted to note that people on this board use MD in different ways and that there's no one-size-fits-all solution for improvement of MD sound. The important thing is that we all do use MD, in whatever way is available or best for each of us. BTW, shortly after my acquisition of the JB930, I also got a non-Sony deck - a Kenwood MD-2070. I found this on eBay as a never-used item. It certainly looks that way. First audio impression was that it's not up to the JB930's lofty standards, but still pretty good, especially considering that it is ATRAC 4.5. Not sure just yet how I am going to use it. Have a good day, all, and keep enjoying MD. Bruce (or Bluecrab, take your pick)