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I wonder if you can use the software bundled with the ICD-SX750, lol. It handles all of that quite nicely. It's almost certainly a free download. You want Digital Voice Editor Version 3.3 Stephen

I have a 32" Sony Bravia, on which I have a recent update. It doesn't recognize a file whose ending is ".avi". If I change the ending to ".mpg" it now recognizes it but refuses to play it, saying the contents are not playable.

Score one for the ICD-SX750 - 48, 128 and 192 recording bit rates for MP3. Mind you, I still prefer LPEC STHQ (which you don't have at all) over almost any MP3 rate (even 256k) below about 320. It's particularly good for voice, as this is a voice recorder. I recorded a concert (at 1411 PCM) with children's voices and piano recently, and the piano was perfect, using "only" the inbuilt mikes. Mind you I am seriously tempted to see about an M10 at that price. Would mean a trip to the USA as there are no Amazon electronics sales here in Canuck-land. Stephen

I wish you every good fortune in your determined quest.

Get the originals and start again. If you don't have the CD's, you are mostly out of luck.

Real Player never had download support (at least any version I have seen). To do so requires secret keys and protocol from Sony.

The hi-MD format will only last forever if Sony makes a HiMD deck. And it seems they aren't about to. When you look at how simple the servicing of a flash recorder is... well that's one answer why, right there. I've pointed out many times that an AtracCD-capable headunit is like having a HiMD in your car. Everyone seems to come to this thread and vote so maybe I will ask my question here: Does anyone know how the MP3-capable car changers (like the CDX-757MX) work? Do they send data or audio to the head unit? If they were to send data, I bet they would play ATRAC CD's too. But I don't really want to go to the hassle of trying it out if not. Stephen

Here's the (my) theory. If you start with with any sort of background noise (FM, recording hiss, turntable rumble), it takes a lot more bits to encode than a nice quiet signal from digital (internet or ??) radio, or from CD. ATRAC encodes noise-free sounds very well indeed. I made a bit of a thing of this this year, trying to convince myself why some things sounded great at LP4 and others did not, whereas LP2 was basically good enough for most sources. By "good enough" I mean that a musician wanting to hear <whatever> detail can hear it, without distortion (at least that wasn't in the original playback source). I iterated over a wide range of combinations before realising that the context was more important than the content. Add to this that the MD decks (much less convinced about the portables) have some nice circuitry that filter (digitally) the signal in all the right places after A->D conversion on their analogue inputs, and one starts to appreciate the "magic" of MD. Actually it's just hard work and good solid engineering by Sony. I used SP from the beginning for vinyl and had very good luck making CD's with it. Took me a while to realise that recording direct to LP2 and LP4 work well too - but only if the source is clean. LP2 copes better than LP4, of course. One of the crucial observations by me and others was that SPEECH came out with horrible sibilants from certain sources. Aha, thinks I - must be something in the encoding itself or trying to encode something which basically isn't there. High frequencies presumably. Cut 'em out, and away to the races. (Oh yes there's one more thing - if you rip a CD to WAV using a fast ripper like the one in SonicStage, it sounds fine UNTIL you try to compress it. Then all hell breaks loose, and most people myself included, decide that LP modes are not for them. Turns out the ripped WAV file has faults which don't matter at uncompressed playback speeds).

Where's your reference for that? It's the first I've heard of it, and I would be significantly surprised to see confirmation (I've been wrong many times about many things in my life). The LP4 is the only one that I am aware of that uses Joint Stereo and its behaviour under poor signal conditions is quite characteristic - it will audibly drop to mono, which I have never ever heard on any other ATRAC version. I can't really speak for Hi-LP as I haven't used it much.

Trust me, the raw SP data IS uploaded.

Everything depends on how it was mastered.....

Very odd. This is not the same manual I looked at after the original upload (or I'm going crazy!). The setting to switch bands is clearly there. Also there is mention of .oma playback yet the specifications NOWHERE mention it (except to say some Atrac copyright stuff).

Yes!

Yes, the reason the RH10 and 910 do not support SP is that they have to support native MP3 playback (the NH1 does not, being first gen). The RH1 has more memory and can do both, according to Avrin (I think that's what he said).

Chris, you're supposed to know this stuff, having been around here a long time. If you followed the link you would be able to read page 37 of the manual, as I just did to double-check. Stephen

Aha! We finally found the device id of the 333/373. It's E7. Makes sense. I'll edit my post above. Still unlikely that PCLK functionality will be enabled without using the XP virtual machine, though. Yet one more detail for Azureal and his merge job - the LAM-1 is device # 80

Great! Now I don't actually have W7-64 here, so I recommend we get Azureal in on the act. The INF file you posted is for the PCLK part. I think there is probably a SECOND set of drivers for the NetMD, is the only problem. So we may still need that ID. It's probably in NETMDUSB.INF. Please post that if it exists. Depending on that we may still be able to help. This driver you posted doesn't help fix the NetMD (ie your ability to download files to the unit) part at all. It's helpful to me personally because now I understand a bit more about the mechanism of the setup (which I don't have) for those machines which have no PS/2 (that's not PlayStation but Personal System, an IBM name nothing to do with Sony) cable to control them, but only a single connection via USB. That is the CMT-C7NT, the CMT-M333NT (and CMT-M373NT too), and the CMT-M100MD (this one isn't listed on the equipment browser), and the various LAM models (which have separate setup files anyway). This is getting complicated because I can't test any of it. What it looks like happens is that the system barfs because the opcWMA.DLL will not work in the 64-bit environment. A totally different problem to the one noted by everyone else. And I have a horrid feeling you are out of luck because Sony isn't going to fix a ten year old system. The file that wouldn't install may need a 64-bit wrapper and you aren't going to get one this way. What you need to do is to run in the XP compatibility box. Save yourself a headache and go and buy the upgrade to W7 professional. Then you can install PCLK (and all the other stuff too) under "XP" (which is what the compatibility box is) and it is guaranteed (!?) to work. Clear as mud? Stephen PS - if you can live without the PCLK functionality, you may be able to at least have this as NetMD device by adding lines to the file Azureal posted in the proper places like this: [ControlFlags] ExcludeFromSelect=USB\VID_054C&PID_008E ; C7NT ExcludeFromSelect=USB\VID_054C&PID_00E7 ; 333NT/373NT (should be the same as each other) [sony] %NETMDUSB.DeviceDesc%=NETMDUSB.Dev, USB\VID_054C&PID_008E ; C7NT %NETMDUSB.DeviceDesc%=NETMDUSB.Dev, USB\VID_054C&PID_00E7 ; 333NT/373NT [sony.NTAMD64] %NETMDUSB.DeviceDesc%=NETMDUSB.Dev, USB\VID_054C&PID_008E ; C7NT %NETMDUSB.DeviceDesc%=NETMDUSB.Dev, USB\VID_054C&PID_00E7 ; 333NT/373NT You'll also need the netmdusb760.sys driver on hand

Yes, if you have a 480 there is NO way to get data out of the machine. You can get analogue, just like Soundbox says. In an ideal world we could get you a digital copy. But either your friend would need more equipment, OR we would need the disk. The one thing he DOES NOT want to do is analogue line in to the PC, from any source whatever. The analog inputs on PC sound cards are pretty uniformly cheap-and-nasty, and you would be sacrificing quality bigtime. Copying analog from MD to MD will not be too bad as the MD analogue inputs have got nice filters on them.

You can do all of that - but the "right" place for that copy is on the computer (and thence to a CD). You still don't tell me what kind of disk was made and in what machine. Presumably since it's not yours and you are helping him out, you simply don't know. This unfortunately now reduces to a series of hypothetical questions along the lines of "if x and y then would z be possible?" and we're basically spinning wheels making polite conversation. Sorry.

Don't even go there. Thanks to Sony's paranoia (mind you Apple does it too!) you simply cannot copy a MD unless you have an MDS-W1 (and that only if the disk is old-fashioned "SP" - not HiMD or MDLP). If it's a HiMD (1GB or 80m disk formatted for HiMD) recordings that were made on it should be uploadable to PC. Copying them back to MD may be more complicated. If it's a NetMD (LP2, LP4) there's little hope. Your best bet, if you want something off of a disk, is to ask someone if they could get the music for you. Me for example. Is the contents of this disk commercial tracks that came from a PC? Most likely hopeless. But if they are someone's treasured recording, you can probably get them. Tell us more about the disk the music is on. Describe it (colour, words) and anything you know about the unit on which it was made and on which you can now play it.

Remotes work by changing resistance. Dirty contacts change the resistance too. Contact cleaner is available at all electronics stores (I don't mean Best Buy etc but even they might carry it).

This was from the internet. You will likely find that it plays just fine on any MDLP unit or Hi-MD unit (as a native MDLP disk, or I can transfer it back on to MD in half the space using HiMD mode, the same collection of bits, not altered by the upload and download at all). I tried recording off the air (FM) with my bookshelf unit but I am almost convinced now that the bandwidth gets wasted recording the hiss you speak of. LP2 is fine, LP4 is not. But internet streams are typically "pure" if properly mastered.

Two choices that are cost effective: 1. Terratec - normal audio card http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Terratec-Aureon-5-1-PCI-Sound-Card-Digital-OUT-/300497399221 you'll have to download the drivers, and get yourself optical cable(s), this is bare bones, but the card is great 2. USB Audio card. The ones on Ebay are fine, I have one of these, some people charging a lot more than this for what looks like the same thing; http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/External-USB-Virtual-7-1-Sound-Audio-Box-Card-Adapter-/220649538434 (there's also orange packaging but it is the same thing)

Either method uses the same codec (Atrac). The problem is that analogue cables and the analogue output of your source now become critical - as you rightly divined in your first post. I record digital sources (from the internet) or analogue source (radio - actually it's digital but I can't get at the digital version of the signal, which is just as well because someone has to decode it anyway, so I leave that to the receiver} in real time, too. Depending on the (original) source & bit rate I record in LP2 or LP4 or Hi-SP. Or you can use the CD on the computer with a USB Audio card and then it's digital all the way.