sfbp

I reread the thread Charlie. Thanks for all that. Just to point out that you are perilously close to breaking a policy which we very painfully established (mainly because a certain individual spent his entire life attempting to trespass on our good natures), namely that self-posted eBay ads are not acceptable. I think this is fine, as it stops just short of actually posting a link. But I wanted to post this publicly so that those lurking can understand that we take a dim view of those who seek to promote their business via the forum. I absolutely don't count you in that number - and that the end of the thread where it is all described is totally appropriate to mention it. 'nuff said Kind regards Stephen

You're very welcome and doubtless if you hang around we shall be calling on your expertise in due course. As to *small*, you ain't seen nuffin' in that generation. The HiMD and all-flash devices are way worse than the good ol' N707. Well done and welcome to the board!

OK if we've eliminated all of those, I'd now be inclined to check the microswitches. There's one that turns off the power when the device is opened. Section 1, page 4 of the service manual.

Exactly. It's almost the only one that does, IIRC. So, the question is, does your problem somehow arise from something connected to the NiCd technology? You won't get any power from USB, that is in the definition of NetMD (and USB 1.1). Are you sure your charger is working? Have you measured battery output voltage both unconnected and under (presumably) load in the device? Seems to me this smells of power failure. Even if it doesn't work with Duracells, the chances are something in the power circuitry is messed up. I wonder whether you have any battery decomposition perhaps? Kind regards

I noticed you mentioned NiCd - haven't seen those in a while. Was this one of the units that did NiCD as an alternative to NiMH?

I cheated. I pulled the jack half way out. Works perfick, to quote Pop Larkin. Nite all

spdif would be another way to get sound in, 'tis all

So it's really hot, then. Hot air, in fact. It will likely NOT be convenient to find a Coax output, however I do have a converted TOSlink<->Coax and I just ordered another $10 wonder that extracts SPDIF Opt and Coax from an HDMI source (wonders will never cease!).

Stephen was taking SO to post office to mail an unmailable parcel. Still unmailable as the address for mailing got left behind. The mic is absolutely fine, its a Shure SM58. Thanks, I had already been warned about 48V. That thing is built like a tank though. What I am curious (RTFM) what the "Air" button does. Both inputs seem to work regardless of whether their associated button is pushed. If none of this works, it renews my determination to revive the very old MOTU that I have that has ALL the things you mention. However I don't think my portable will give me SPDIF out so there's another whole layer of complexity feeding something that does Coax out. Incidentally the MOTU SPDIF connector is a 5-pin DIN (ugh). Nah, there's Coax too. Blast, the postie says he was forbidden to bring the new (used) Mac and it's sitting at the Sub PO and won't be available till tomorrow. The MOTU absolutely refused to work with a Firewire 400 sound card in a PC, sigh, but I know it works fine with a VERY OLD Mac. Hence the excursion into Focusrite territory. Also curious because the Focusrite is the only thing that I can find that gets low latency because they have their own ASIO driver. So if I end on PC then I have to investigate sofware mixers, and on Mac maybe the Motu stuff will do what I need.

It's barely a mixer. The absolute simplest thing that supports a "real" microhone and headphones and works with USB hopefully without any latency I'm new at this "pro" stuff, all these galumphing great jacks I don't really want..... The simple aim of this device (for me) is to input a sound stream from a music device, and mix that with speaking on a a microphone (plugs in on the left). The rest ought to be do-able in software but this part seems easiest without.

If I set a minidisc or other portable to LINE OUT, what other problems can i expect feeding that into a common-or-garden sound jack on a mixer or other pro sound equipment? I have a cable with 3.5mm on one end and 6mm on the other (1/4"). Both are stereo jacks but the receiving end is defiantly mono. No idea how to fix that. What I do know is that with some combination of adapters that the sound was very iffy and dependent on twiddling the jacks. However even with my nice new direct cable with gold contacts on each end there are still some problems with limiting (and the sink device supposedly has tons of headroom) as i increase the volume beyond about half way round the dial. For the record, for this test I used an NW-HD5, battery fully charged. Sounds fine into headphones.

Once again the misnomer "over-light" crops up. Prompts me to tell a story relating to the most successful (non-hiTech) entrepreneur of our times in British Columbia, a certain Jimmy Pattison, he of Scots background and certainly that Scottish austere, disciplined take-no-prisoner approach to business (25 car dealerships at last count). He also founded a grocery chain known as Save On Foods. However out on Vancouver Island, the stores are still known as OverWaitea (dropped the name when he expanded to the mainland, I guess). Why? Because when he first started in business running a grocery, when someone came in to buy a quarter pound of TEA, he always made sure that they got more than they paid for. Hence "over-weight-tea" became Overwaitea. And you all thought the name had something to do with being fat (most people here instinctively assume that)! I wish some more business leaders and politicians were good at that sort of customer relations instead of getting fat at our expense. Sorry for the digression.

Good, you had me really worried

"AC" on the meter???? Whoa folks....

Digging out my trusty B-10 to lend to a friend for artistic purposes. Happened to notice that the unit supports MONO recording. I never noticed that was possible before. It's definitely gone from Hi-MD units, though they will play it back. On checking, all the NetMD units such as JB980 and N910 support it.

NGY: I think if you post twice it may under certain circumstances combine the posts. For example when you quote 2 different posts. Not sure, though. Never tried to do it on purpose only by accident. (I think you may be able to join two of your own posts after the fact, too) Yeah, this is getting weird isn't it. I'm wondering about a very noisy powersupply. THOSE might degrade at the same month in history.

I've never used Itunes. But if I was the proprietor of Itunes I might well send the "holey" bit patterns to prevent people making second gen copies. As I said, I don't think that's what's happening here - this all arose when you suddenly got "cannot copy" in the middle of your various tests. It WOULD be interesting to see if the skips happen on the coax connection. I have a little gizmo that converts TOSlink to coax and also the reverse (one box) which might be worth the $10 or so (of course you could be an electronics whiz like these two guys and make one for about $3), if your source is TOSlink only. https://www.ebay.com/itm/Digital-Coaxial-to-Optical-Toslink-SPDIF-Audio-Converter-Bi-Directional-Swtich/233400933139

One other little detail. Depending on what software you used to create a CD-R, it (the CD) MAY be considered uncopyable, like a second generation MD. Bruce (Bluecrab) demonstrated this to me and sent me a CD with holes in it (not literally, but in the SCMS bit pattern!) to prove the point, which I still have. I suppose it's even possible that some tracks on a CD-R might be copyable, others not. But that's not what you're seeing, is it. You're getting skips. Sorry for the interruption - regular programming now resumes

In windows there are two sets of environment variables. You can see them if you pull up a command prompt and type SET <enter> To modify them it's easy enough to pull up the advanced properties (right click "My computer" or "ThisPC" or whatever its called, and select properties). The PATH environment variable determines where the system looks before it loads the next DLL it needs (also the next program you ask for).

It depends where the source disk was recorded. If it's an original recording, you will be able to make a first generation copy. This does NOT apply to anything sent to an MD via USB, which is *by definition* considered a copy.

You won't be able to copy from one MD to another by TOSlink in the majority of cases. This is SCMS in action.

Here, for reference is the list of device IDs you should care about, lifted from NETMD760.inf VID_054C&PID_006F ; NW-E7 VID_054C&PID_0075 ; MZ-N1 VID_054C&PID_0080 ; LAM-1 VID_054C&PID_0081 ; MDS-JB980 VID_054C&PID_0084 ; MZ-N505 VID_054C&PID_0085 ; MZ-S1 VID_054C&PID_0086 ; MZ-N707 VID_054C&PID_0097 ; Vaio PC NetMD VID_054C&PID_00C6 ; MZ-N10 VID_054C&PID_00C7 ; MZ-N910 VID_054C&PID_00C8 ; MZ-NF810/N710 VID_054C&PID_00C9 ; MZ-NF610/N510 VID_054C&PID_00CA ; MZ-NE410 VID_054C&PID_00E7 ; 333NT/373NT (should be the same as each other) VID_054C&PID_00EB ; MZ-NE910/NE810 VID_054C&PID_0188 ; MZ-N920 VID_054C&PID_0101 ; LAM-10 VID_054C&PID_0113 ; AM-NX1 VID_054C&PID_0119 ; CMT-SE9 VID_054C&PID_013F ; MDS-S500 VID_054C&PID_014C ; AM-NX9 ;Sharp/Kenwood VID_04DD&PID_7202 ; Sharp IM-MT880/899 VID_04DD&PID_9013 ; Sharp IM-DR400/410 VID_04DD&PID_9014 ; Sharp IM-DR420/DR80/DR580, Kenwood DMC-S9NET ; Panasonic VID_04DA&PID_23B3 ; Panasonic SJ-MR250 ; NetMD configs for HiMD Devices VID_054C&PID_017E ; MZ-NH1 VID_054C&PID_0180 ; MZ-NH3D VID_054C&PID_0182 ; MZ-NH900 VID_054C&PID_0184 ; MZ-NH800/NH700 VID_054C&PID_0186 ; MZ-NH600/NH600D/DH710 VID_054C&PID_01E9 ; MZ-DH10P VID_054C&PID_0219 ; MZ-RH10/M100 VID_054C&PID_021B ; MZ-RH910/M10 VID_054C&PID_0286 ; MZ-RH1/M200

you gotta put the python libraries in your path, surprised the install didn't do that. Meaning, alter your path to have the python libraries in it so that when you call DLLs that are relevant, they get loaded.

I'm not up to grappling with Python right now. But it struck me there might have been a performance reason why they took it out. We know the deck-based NetMD seems unusually slow. Maybe this is why?

Excellent work! Quick question: if you throw the extra handshake in to the communications stream of a device that does NOT require it, what happens? i.e. is the simplest to put that step in to ALL devices, thereby simplifying maintenance? Not sure it's important, but special cases always end up being what drag something down. Decks probably came before portables; is this just history, or is there a genuine need to police the state of the connection when talking to one of these decks?