sfbp

I think it depends on how the optical out of the CD dithers the >16 bit information that is undoubtedly present on CD's (why else would they have been talking about 20-bit oversampling 23 years ago), unless I have completely misunderstood. MD is inherently 24-bit (floating point) whereas CD is (at least in principle) 16-bit fixed point. If the CD reproduction system does a better job than straight conversion, then recording to the MD (possibly via ANALOGUE inputs, I'm really not quite clear on this point) may beat any wholly "digital" pathway involving ripping. I don't know. Some of this stuff seems very arcane to me. Maybe all I am saying is, try it, and whatever works the best, use it, and tell us about it - we may not be surprised.

I burned a disk (after setting the disk title and artist with the "magic" button in SS. It was read just fine in my CMT-PX3, including titles. It shows NO titles in the MXD-D400 but plays fine. It read just fine in my DVP-CX995V with titles. Looks to me as if the MXD-D400 is the odd one out. No idea why, must be something "wrong" with firmware.

As far as I remember it may well be that the D400 and such don't recognise it. But the text definitely gets written.

On Sonic Stage! It's labelled "Media Info" and is in fact a critical INPUT to the program, not (as you might think) merely an information button.

You can get the disk title if you click on the button on the bottom right. I can't remember what the trick is for titles of tracks. I basically gave up trying to do it with regular CD's.

probably

depends on the CD

that's fine - provided the DVD player doesn't insist on SCMS-ing the signal.

probably because this forum is no longer www.minidisc.org please don't post YouTube videos in signature - which I edited for now. If I have to ban them, I will.

I would take a look at besweet, if I were you.

You've got the simplest fault of all - a completely busted overwrite head. Sorry. Someone will have to replace it (not me). Suggest you try Jim Hoggarth here on the board.

Hi there. Welcome to the forums. Let's start with the simple questions: 1. What version of Windows exactly are you using (including how many bits and what level eg home, pro, ultimate)? 2. What minidisc unit are you using? And what format of MD exactly, is causing all the grief? 3. What is pitstop? Generally anti-virus programs will prevent installations from running in a large number of cases. At the very least it needs to be disabled for install. You can figure out whether it's possible to reenable it after install by simply trying it.

I think the default is 132kbps lossy part. So you might want to rip to 256kbps. This will still downconvert to 132 if you need it, without problems - I've tried that.

There is no encryption in AAL. That's the good news. I use 256kbps as the lossy part, and I use the highest quality encoding (as opposed to highest speed). In size, I think it's about half or a bit less, of a WAV. It will transfer to equal or lower quality (so far I have used 256 and 132, of course) quite easily from SS. And plays back in Windows, though I strongly suspect that playback is of the lossy part only. You've probably worked out the other advantage of AAL over WAV. It (like the compressed formats) has metadata, built into the file. WAV is a great format for preparation, editing and the like, but is a great way to lose recordings once made, by immediate typographical errors or later lapses in (human) memory.

AAL seems (to me) to be very impressive. It's just possible that it was some slightly earlier version of SonicStage which gave me lousy results. However I routinely rip to AAL in any event, since it saves space and is ideally set up for conversion to MD.

A lot depends on what type of disk you are having trouble with. There are 3 possibilities: a. 80m (or 74 or 60) disk formatted in "legacy" format b. 80m formatted in Hi-MD format c. 1GB disk (necessarily in HiMD format). So, first of all try all three and see which causes the problem. The bad news is - once a 1GB disk fails, you may never get it fixed by reformatting in this recorder. Even if working properly. I used a combination of self adjustment (automated), manual adjustment, and (finally) over ride to ignore the final step if it failed. For some reason these 2nd generation HiMD machines are particularly prone to this fault.

If everything works, you may be right. The biggest problem about the failure I have observed is that it is completely silent. The first time you know something went wrong is when you try to downconvert the WAV to (say) LP2.

My only comment is: do not assume that SS will do this as well as you have documented! There's some magic in there when the drive gets introduced to SS for the first time. Evidently it sometimes works. I know I had terrible trouble with CD->WAV rips before I started using EAC.It's always possible that a dying drive will not show up in SS, which perhaps is what happened to me. Also having various other software on your PC that handles CDROMs will (or at least may) blur the picture. Examples: Nero, Roxio (CD Creator).

I think the 950 probably never made it out of Asia (I saw advertised versions in both Chinese and Japanese). The 713/813 manuals seem to show different versions. One for example shows English + Korean, another shows a bunch of European languages. I also note that they seem to have restored the stand/clip thingy which I find incredibly useful, but was probably missing from the 712.

Aha! I missed the NC headphones. Those are very nice, I have a pair in a flash walkman - but the only way I can use them with another device is via a line in cable from the other device. Also I notice that the 713 has 4GB.... very sensible of Sony now flash isn't so expensive as a couple of years ago. The 713 hasn't made it out of Asia yet. I found the brochure where they line the 713,813 and M10 up and label them all "Professional/Musician". Interesting. Mind you there's a small mistake on it - always look at the manuals rather than these marketing tools - the battery on the PCM-M10's are AA's not AAA's. You may want to make sure that the 813 can be configured to have English menus. My 950 cannot - so sometimes I resort to looking at the menus for the 750 and working it out. But you read Japanese, and I don't.

Here's something interesting that people have asked about many times over the years..... a NetMD drive for PC's Unfortunately, and of course, it's for certain VAIO laptops only. But someone out there may be delighted to find this. http://www.ebay.com/itm/Sony-Vaio-PCGA-MDN1-Net-MD-Bay-Unit-/300664345921 http://www.ebay.com/itm/Sony-Vaio-PCGA-MDN1-Net-MD-Bay-Unit-/300664346138 http://www.ebay.com/itm/Sony-Vaio-PCGA-MDN1-Net-MD-Bay-Unit-/300661639405

The 712 is 2GB and you can still put 16GB in it. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sony-ICD-SX712-Digital-Flash-Recorder/dp/B004M8ST2W And that's a UK price (sigh almost as many pounds as dollars). The review (from Amazon.com) that's on the top of the pile seems pretty exhaustive. He has both it and the 750. I have only the 750. He likes it (the 712).

Just to get my final shot in - the PCM-M10 is like a brick but the ICD-SX series is more like a toothbrush. And has all of the qualities A440's claiming for the PCM-M10 at half the price and half the weight. And if instant start is important, then it wins on that count (0 vs 15-20 seconds). Maybe the (inbuilt) mikes aren't quite as good, but so far I have no evidence of that.

20% of an MD is 30 MB. I think the limit is the number of frames = 65536. At 66kbps that may be just about exactly the time you are talking.. about 1 hour.

Ah... the old miscalculated transfer problem? Take a look at the file it builds on the PC. You will notice that it keeps on increasing. The repeated increases and decreases reported by SS may be an artifact on very long files, nothing more. Someone didn't do their math right and when some 16-bit (65536) counter gets overflowed, it has to recalculate. How long is the recording, and at what bit rate? I can predict at what % this may happen if you tell me these.