sfbp

I didn't.

Sure I did. PC's are cheap, Macs are expensive. Neither Sony nor I ever invested in Apple. MD (at least since I bought them second hand) are cheap, iPods are expensive. I started with something that worked and watched it get better. You started with something that didn't work and watched it get less bad. Now we have the religion out of the way, how can we help?

I really don't have much to add on the Mac, I am not a Mac person (at all). But maybe how I got into this might be of interest. It all started when I heard about Digital audio and wondered how I might convert my tapes, records and cassettes into something more lasting. I read somewhere that the only available way to do this was via MD, since (for one thing) at that time, digitizing to PCM on a PC was almost impossible to deal with. The files were too big, too cumbersome, there wasn't enough RAM or storage to make a decent job of editing. (meanwhile at the HiFi store the pro's told me that a digital amp would cost thousands of dollars). But, someone pointed out in an article I have long since lost, MD is great for editing stuff and then the sound is digital "forever". In addition the MD decks were reputed to have great A->D circuitry. I somehow finagled a card into one computer, that had digital in (it was really rather complicated because clearly noone wanted to, or in fact did, offer a card with digital input around that time) and set off on my journey of discovery. I managed to retrieve a whole bunch of stuff from childhood off tapes, and managed to make CD's of the results, uploading the WAV files at x1 just as you are proposing to do now. Very slow and tedious. At some point I purchased a refurbed MZ-NE410 and almost immediately gave up on portables as I found the quality was not good after encoding to the bit rates it could stand (although SP MD's played back just fine). In addition I was much surprised that the USB interface didn't allow going TO the PC, but only download. Strike 1. In the hot summer of 2005 my JE510 upped and died (I read afterwards that it had been victim to an all-too-common fault of this particular model, and I would no longer recommend anyone to buy one). It was another year before I gave up trying to fix it and buy in quick succession a JE520 and a JE630, the former as a replacement for the 510, the latter because it had a keyboard port allowing me to title things easily). The 630 is still with me. It was not until 2007, 1 year after the RH1 came out that I broke down and bought my first "high-end" portable. This was a revolution in many ways. HiMD, and the ability to put 8, 15 or even 30 hours of music at acceptable quality on a single disk won me over completely. However the much-vaunted upload left me unimpressed. It was not until Avrin (and his Russian buddies) here on the board figured out how to make uploads perform to spec that I finally had something which saved TIME when uploading recordings from MD. x10 makes a difference to your life, I can honestly assure you. Somewhere in there I discovered that internet music tends to be free and of higher quality than FM radio,and I was tempted into buying a longplay deck the JE640, which I have never regretted to record long programs. After that it was just a matter of time before I became an addict - the solid engineering and the dazzling beauty of the machinery on such a tiny scale fascinated me (as it has many others). I also discovered AtracCD which is an amazing format because on one non-stealable disk (this happened after thieves nicked $400 of real CD's from my car at the local community centre one morning) you can pack 3 or more complete operas in really good (compressed) quality. Now I can move ATRAC data around from one medium to another at will, including a LAN server where I have about 60GB of ATRAC, mostly LP2 (132kbps) but about 1/3 HiSP (256kbps). Imagine that lot stored as WAV! Not only does it take up ridiculous amounts of space but it's not convenient to move over ethernet on demand. The final piece of the puzzle was to have made to order (for about the price of an RH1 and way less than the NAC-HD1E which I am sure is marvellous but rather overpriced for what it does IMO) my own HTPC complete with HDMI and optical out, and install Windows and Sonic Stage on it as well as software for playing DVD's and AVI files of every description. It's still a great joy to pop a MD with exactly the music I want on it, into a deck or portable, but the really significant part is I have a proper backed-up server with enough music to play forever. And (now) a digital amp/receiver, with optical and HDMI in, that cost me all of $250 second-hand. And all thanks to Sony and MD. I will never ever fall victim to the Apple plague (no offence to you or any other iPod owners here). Too many people here came back from that one and rediscovered MD, for me to be even tempted. I wish you very well in your endeavours, but if you really have a lot of MD's you can do an awful lot worse than get an RH1 and upload everything. The big word of advice is - find one route that works and vary at most one parameter at a time. The best recordings in the universe are only as good as the last bad transcoding of them. Stephen

Over the past few weeks I have had (in forums and by PM) several requests for help fixing the second gen hiMD's (MZ-RH10, MZ-RH910, MZ-M10, MZ-M100, MZ-DH710 and MZ-RH710) which seem to have a rather common problem... failure when writing the TOC at end of recording or any time the disk is modified. None of these requests came to anything; perhaps the owners in question decided that someone who wouldn't charge for their services perhaps had another agenda. I do not. I have two of these units already and don't want another! But I do enjoy fixing things. OK - so I will do it for $40 on the understanding that owner pays postage both ways. I have the relevant equipment and fixed my own defective RH910 after a (year)long battle, almost as soon as I got the right gear to solve this problem with. I will consider doing NH1 and other models (on a trial basis), but it does seem that the RH10/910 is the main offender here. The equipment does what is needed provided service mode is accessible (sometimes the buttons are shot and one cannot even activate the service mode). Please contact me by PM so that we may transfer the conversation to proper private email and put things on a proper business footing. Thanks Stephen

Time to clean up the device map? Start here

I will re-read and comment in depth later. For now welcome to the forums and here are my first two thoughts: 1. RH1 is now supported in Native W64 with the driver netmd760.sys (see the pinned discussion) 2. The Linux-minidisc project has some scripts that enable upload from RH1 to linux and other platforms including mac, pc. Stephen

W7/32 bit is fine. Install the right driver and you should be away to the races.

Eggzactly. Frankly I think it's a miracle you can even do that, when you contemplate the grand mystery of 64-bit addressing It's definitely not W7's fault, you would be fine in W7/32, and you would be completely out of luck in Vista 64. Just a note: it's not MCrew per se but the USB driver which is the problem here.

You know that the technology for reading pre-recorded MD's is different? Perhaps it's as simple as the detector microswitch not working? The other possibility is that there is a different alignment on some items (the service manuals refer to it as CD*** vs. MO) and they didn't do the adjustment properly after installing new optical head. You can confirm this by going into service mode and seeing the number and nature of the last CD errors. Jim is around here, better to PM him. It's possible he doesn't see the Ebay mail right away. Stephen PS this may also be a sign that the laser power needs to be adjusted to match the actual head installed (the so-called iOP value, as it is a measure of the current used by that particular laser head). The head will have the IOP number written on it, and the techs needed to install that number into the firmware on the drive. If, as you say, they are not so familiar with MD, maybe they didn't. Left unfixed, you could be looking at premature OP death because too much power is used. Another symptom of this is that MO disks are rather warm when you first take them out. *** just like a (read-only) CD

And there are a whole bunch of other manuals in there, relating to the same machine. 177 pages looks like a complete manual to me. What is it you need that's missing?

You have it exactly right. You have to start the virtual XP mode. And you need the advanced versions of W7 before you can do that. It's a free download but only if you got the more expensive version(s).

Nope. You will not get the PCLK driver running in native W64 mode. You can install it to the virtual machine (XP-32), but for this you need Professional or Ultimate version of Windows 7.

All good stuff. It really plays back nicely, I agree. The D40 is the last of the line that has PC Link. But I actually prefer my bookshelf unit since it has all the same electronics as the D40 PLUS a very nice radio and optical in. I may even get the tape deck - when and if it arrives I will finally write a review. I would be most interested in A-B comparison of JB940 vs D400 both using optical out. I don't know much about the Marantz but it seems on the 940 you have some options there with word length and sample rate. Stephen

I don't think you want one from USA, particularly one that's in any way defective. However I am not sure that they ever made a European model of this one, and so you will need to get a transformer. This is an international board, one needs always to include location in the request.

http://cgi.ebay.com/Sony-MXD-D400-Compact-CD-Player-MiniDisk-MD-Recorder-/150544763969

This supercedes anything we knew about last June.

It fails? (sorry we have some little difficulties here with language) Please PM me.

The disadvantage of uncompressed is that the network in your house, particularly wireless, may not be all that happy with the load.

There's no hack on the N.American models. But they and the Japanese models, although the unit uses the same (world) charger, it will have a different plug for the wall. Clearly you don't need much more than one of those things you can get in Boots for travelling, but that is one small detail that will be different. Pauseplaystop.com has new ones. But honestly the best sources of supply are GB and Japan. Stephen

OK we're not out of the wood yet. That's the symptom I had too. It worked fine. The critical thing is the writing of the TOC. Now you need to do some very simple tests with writing. By "simple" I mean you have be very strict and ONLY do one thing at a time. First test: take the NEW disk you tried (was it 80m or 1GB?) and use the buttons on the unit and/or remote to FORMAT the disk. DO NOT connect to USB, please. Please tell me how that goes. Don't try any disk EXCEPT the one that was brand new. BTW I am assuming that you can still read (play) disks that have been made a long time, it is only the new one(s) which causes a problem. You must tell me if this is not true. Tell me how that works. I will have some more test when you tell me the result. Please don't try anything else... yet. It will get way too confusing.

I mean, if you take a brand new disk (not a re-used one with tracks removed), does it hang up when you first put it in? The most likely thing is that the laser power needs adjusting. However this is very difficult without measuring equipment.

Great. Just wanted to add that the new spam service is doing an amazing job. Just when I had given up adding names to the ban log since there were so many and clearly all bot-generated. Stephen

I believe you are correct.

No problem. Specific questions are easy, but it sounds like you need full time help to resolve all the problems you describe. Maybe someone else will leap in here...... Cheers

Sounds like adjustment needed, to me. "Thinking" on HiMD is often because "stuff" happens when SonicStage needs to read all tracks that got deleted from the unit. In order to rectify DRM. Does it do this with a new disk? Yes, on the info. But I don't control the browser, it's at another site.