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There are multiple backups of the SS database, so the result of doing the following is probably not terminal. You will find the database (and its many backups) at C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Sony Corporation\SonicStage\Packages The file is called MtData.mdb (the numbered ones are the backups). Open it up and you will find out what you want to know if you open the "t_object" table. Look in Column 203, I think. The file name of each song is there, including path. This should enable you to diagnose your problem. If you can't do that (eg because you don't have Microsoft Access 2003), feel free to zip up the .mdb file and put it somewhere I can look at it, and I will TELL you where it thinks all your files are. Hope this helps Stephen

BTW, while you're havering over sending it off to Sony (and anyway if you cannot for some reason collect on the warranty), excellent results for the Jog Lever Problem have been achieved by careful adjustment (neither too loose nor too tight) of the two screws on the bottom of the unit. Mind you the comment above is right on - try to avoid using the jog lever as much as you can Cheers

Ha! I never noticed it because..... tada.... I almost never use MP3's. Good point. But the EH70 will play every single MD format from SP(and mono) to MDLP to Atrac3+ (all rates).

Yeah jump on it quick while the warranty is still active. After that don't use RH1 as a player, just an uploader. Sorry. There's lots of players, and the EH70 is of almost exactly the same vintage as the RH1, lacking only the d-Norm setting for playback. That's another whole story anyway, I think d-Norm may be bad for one's ears.

Great. Every time you connected up another different USB-connected MD, you added some more entries. It seems likely that the reason the RH1 has a problem is that in order to upload (download is easy), a poll must be made (round robin) of all the NetMD drivers (I dont know if you have ever tried it but you can connect more than one NetMD device, and SS will handle it just fine - the problem comes when you try to put two on the same USB port via a hub but that's another story again, which Sony warns you about). My thinking is that having too many of these in the device map causes the driver to MISS (ie streaming does not occur). Hence the slowdown. It's a bit like the old floppy disk format problem which you can read about here. Don't worry about removing them (ie it's not a BAD thing for them to be absent). They will reinstall as needed. BUT you cannot upload non-HiMD (LP2, LP4, mono, stereo SP) unless you use the RH1, of course. Downloads are fine (although I believe the RH1 is the only one that does USB 2.0, someone will surely correct me on this point). Remember that only Simple Burner, Sound Forge and now the #linux-minidisc program QHiMDTransfer will produce "unprotected" tracks at the other end. Sonic Stage will not - SS-downloaded MD tracks are always "protected". There will, we hope, be a simple way to rid ourselves of that protection but for now the safest way would be to burn CD's with your precious stuff and transfer using SB to a NetMD. Circuitous but reliable. No such restriction is applied to HiMD, though still-encrypted files on a HiMD (either 80m or 1GB) can never be up-transferred anywhere else (if you decrypt them first, that restriction goes away too).

I *think* but it's only a guess, that the magic of MD is the filters applied when recording. I think the only problem with PCM is when it's not properly mastered. Certainly having owned a good PCM recorder (RH1), I would always use it for live recording so I can afford to amp up the sound without loss of quality. Doing so with compressed sound is liable to produce artifacts, right? Where the input level is known in advance, I would record at whatever compression I can get away with.

You may have to "revive" them. Do you use a charger, or an MD unit? Some are better than others. I find that whenever I had a doubtful gumstick battery, I stick it in my MZ-R91 and it magically comes back to life. Not sure why.

Well...... 1. I took it into a guy I (unexpectedly) found on Friday who actually has someone who might for minimal charge fix it. If he wants vast amounts of $$$ I will refuse it and try my luck at your trick. 2. I'd love to know how to get this one into Service Mode, anyway but have no manual at this point. Maybe worth it to pay for a manual.... 3. Someone mentioned somewhere on the web they had another (unrelated) unit come up into 76-90 mode by mistake one time. Makes me think there's a way and no need to modify crystals etc as has been done for some car tuners. 4. In the store (of the guy selling the converters who might get it fixed) the unit started out OK in 100V, but eventually crashed. It would not revive until I set it back to 120. Again, makes me think it might be some NVRAM setting rather than a hardware change, as the back says "DHC-MD595" suggesting the unit might be common to Japan and here. If all else fails it will still be a nice unit for 'puter (via optical), or I might even pinch the speakers and use for surround sound in the main room!

Speaking for myself, I asked the same question of Avrin. We decided just to go ahead and install over top. Certainly I installed it over top of existing "official" 4.3. His steps had more to do with partial installations, I think. If you don't have the trick that turns on the hidden device drivers, you won't see them. If you don't have slowdown with RH1 uploads of non-HiMD, you don't care. The post is But getting rid of USB drivers you don't need is of itself a GOOD thing.

Every few days or every time you do significant uploads. Remember, ANY System Restore or disk crash or reinstallation of Windows will cause you to lose everything (that you didn't decrypt). You should be able to upload HiMD stuff under W7 (depending on version). Apparently Sony's releasing proper Win7 support in August, at least for the RH1.

You're very welcome. I find it's better to keep the explan short and let people come back for clarification, than spend ages writing up an irrelevant (and often WRONG) reply. The upshot is, NOONE should ever be leaving their files still encrypted. BTW there's also a link to the FileConversion Tool added to the Start Menu along with Sonic Stage. So you don't actually have to fire up SS first

Avrin doesn't seem to have been around so I will (pace Avrin!) field this one. Installing over the top works just fine. The only thing you MIGHT want to do is the famous "remove all unused USB drivers" step that started this off. I find that even with Ultimate, I still get slowdown on RH1 MD uploads when a non-RH1 has been used with NetMD disk, connected to the PC.

It's quite simple, really. You have to decrypt the files. Most newbies don't even realise Sony locked them to a particular installation of Windows. Run the File Conversion Tool from XP, and all will be well. Remember to uncheck the :copy protection: box when you get to that point. Good luck

Woo hoo! I got me a bookshelf unit with optical input that plays MDLP and CD. The Sony DHC-MD595, otherwise known as the CMT-PX3 (it has one designation on the back and one on the front) cost me all of $20. Not bad for something originally priced at Y60,000. It's a Japanese unit. I plan to hook it to the optical out on my computer, for playback in the computer room. Nice little speakers. All made in Japan. However there are a few problems: 1. The MD won't play - error C13 reading TOC. COULD THIS BE BECAUSE OF THE 100V model? Would it be worth getting a stepdown transformer (120->100) first before trying to get the drive fixed? 2. There's no connecting gear with it. I understand that there's a USB dongle/thingummy that will control the unit from the PC. No big deal, I would just like to know what I am looking for and maybe I can find one on the internet. There's a second socket, strange in appearance, that the manual says is for a tape deck, this I probably don't care about. The USB socket is round and has (i think) 6 pins. UPDATE: it appears to be a PC keyboard connector. Nothing much happens when I plug a keyboard in, though. 3. The FM is 76-90. Not much use here in Canada. I don't care that much, just wondered if there is a commonly available fix to change the range, as it looks like this unit is identical to the north-american-marketed one. Hope someone out there knows something about this unit (or one similar). Thanks!

Here Good luck, please let us know your experience. Stephen

There's a guy in England who can fix it for 10 pounds. The overwrite ribbon cable is busted, for sure.

And the 333ES has MDLP whereas the 555ES does not.

If you have problems with too much bass you might be surprised how good the all-in-one flash recorder (ICD SX750) is. That was my only criticism of that beast, the bass a little light.

I keep seeing (for more than a year) the same listing for the same unit (always Canterbury) over and over again. Makes me think either a. he has lots of them, or b. it never sells or c. there is something strange. Cheers Stephen

I haven't looked at the Yamaha before. It seems to have nice specs, and optical out. I am pretty sure that nothing numbered under 500 (in the Sony line) has optical (digital) out. Recommended models with optical out: SP only: MDS-JE520,530,630 MDS-JB920,930 MXD-D1,D2 (combo CD/MD) - most later models had optical out removed. SP and MDLP: MDS-JE640,770,780 (there's a mod to hack an optical xmitter into a 480 here somewhere) MDS-JB940,980 MXD-D400 (combo MD/CD MDLP deck, often still available in Japan brand new at auctions.yahoo.co.jp) There are also various high end ES models (which their owners swear by, of course) but most of the high end-ness has to do with the DAC, and it's possible (at least according to me) that with a good modern amp with optical in, you don't even need the super duper high end specs for straightforward playback, since the optical out is hooked almost directly to the DSP chip that reads the disk. Of the models listed above, only the 940 has the ability to produce 24-bit optical output. In addition there are the MDS-Enn (nn=10,11,12 for a start) "pro" models which at the time were highly thought of because they have no SCMS restrictions, and are rackmounted. With the advent of amplifiers that have optical in, this isn't so important, as all will reproduce just about anything that comes out of an optical port. Stephen

First the good news: there is a slim possibility that eventually we can get the data back. It depends on some work that's going on over at the #linux-minidisc project. Now the bad news: you MUST (for the moment) have a CD player designed for ATRAC. If you want to get a decent line out signal, one solution is to mount one of the car units in a slot designed for a CD/DVD drive in a PC. The voltages are right, just a little bit of work getting screws that will hold it in. Somewhere there's a nice article about how to do this. Then you can at least get an analog signal with decent levels to re-capture on some device with no restrictions. When you say you "have" them, how did you play them before? Sony never allowed them to play on a PC, only to be made on a PC. It sounds like maybe you inherited them from someone.

Well I recently heard someone opine that once a new technology is proven, everyone just copies it. I dare say by the time JVC had licensed it from Sony there wasn't much motivation to do anything different. Overwrite head mechanism isn't getting the overwrite head close enough to the disk. Could be mechanical. The next phase is the overwrite head breaks off all over your favourite MD. I think so. Even trying to make a track mark or any kind of edit, and you will lose a whole disk every time, when overwrite is not working. It's probably time to get another deck (cheap) or an M200/RH1 (they are the same thing as each other) to upload your existing disks if you have recordings you care about What a dismal post to be making as I finally cross the 2K threshold. Is this a sign of the future? Cheers Stephen

This sounds a lot like what happened to my Sony MDS-JE510 before it died. You can check around here for the problems known to exist with that model. It appears to be from about the same Anno Domini. In my case it was absolutely terminal. One question: can you record successfully? If not, then the problems are likely too severe to make it worthwhile resurrecting this as a player-only machine. Hope this helps Stephen PS see here, sounds like the right idea. Found it on the JE510 page.

Gianni Schicchi (3rd of three unrelated 1-act operas usually played together, known as "Il Trittico") by Puccini. This is the piece that "rehabilitated" him (1918) after the public hated Madam Butterfly (1916). Nice performance from NY Met.

Aw go on, give it a whirl! Just make sure you know how to put it back As far as Windows Media Player goes, I find it can be used to organise my ATRAC files quite nicely, as long as I use the playlist feature (which exists also in SS, to be fair). Stephen