sfbp

I have wondered about this many times. Here it is (in Sonic Stage V a pointer got moved into the registry but in 4.3 it must be hard coded): ..\<sonicstage main dir>\Data\Image\se\complete.wav I have not experimented with it, so can give you no recipe for disabling it without anything crashing. The most foolproof way might be to substitute a wav file that has silence in it. I generally gave up because I find that SonicStage is picky about timing, and I tend not to run other things when I am uploading (into the PC). I hope I haven't enabled you to find a whole bunch of new ways to crash our least favourite favourite music manager

Quit muckin' abaht Avrin created this version because it fixes a number of bugs. Since Sony no longer supports ATRAC it seems likely this will be the last version hence "ultimate". If I had $1 for everyone who had ever used the word "just" when describing their computer and/or software needs, I would be rich. Good luck!

You don't NEED it but you absolutely WANT it. 'nuff said.

No. Yes. Especially with RH1 don't use anything else.

I think the sound is excellent. I have done several live recordings. By accident I switched the mike to the "directional" (mono) mike for the last one, and even that was good enough to splice onto the video to make a DVD. I made an MD recording at the same event, and the RH1 was better - but it was using my Soundpro mikes which have better specs (20Hz-20kHz) anyway. OK, now you are seriously in the market I will give you the negatives: 1. The 950 is not available in English (yet, or perhaps ever, who knows?). I survived the Japanese menus (perhaps Chinese would be worse) easily because I can look at the English menus of the 750 which are in all cases except 1 identical in function. Richard (admin) here will tell you of his experiences ordering Japanese-only MD recorder and players. All the files and codec names (eg STHQ) stay in English (or whatever), and there is English software supplied or available free from Sony. The English software shows all the SETTINGS on the recorder in English so actually it's not necessary to read 1 word of Japanese as long as you don't mind tweaking the device by connecting it to the PC occasionally. 2. The Folder system is very nice but perhaps not quite as smooth as MD, though in some ways a lot more flexible. My biggest complaint has to do with track ordering. I have no idea if the PCM-M10 fixes this one either. If you drop a track onto the player (either using Digital Voice Editor 3, or simply drag and drop) the order of play within a folder is by title. However to be fair, the DVE3 does manage the metadata properly for you, allowing file name and title both to be stored on the device. This means that a proper title will pop up in the display, with the track number missing (ripped off and used to order). It even accepts arbitrarily formatted track numbers such as d01 - d99, which I discovered by messing around yesterday. What you put on using DVE will stay (and play) in the order you see on the screen of the PC. 3. The record button is perhaps too easy to push (this was designed as a voice recorder). As long as you don't have overwrite turned on, this isn't a problem but I find once in a while I end up with some track recorded by accident. No big deal, really, given the erase button, which many MD newbies seem to miss (and I agree with them), that probably got there from the MD business recorder line such as B10. 4. (I'm being really picky here) The microphone seems to "get my fingers on it" as I pick this out of a shirt pocket, avoiding the record and play buttons (however there's a nice HOLD just where you would expect it). In time, maybe the grease from my fingers will do bad things to the microphone. As to gapless, that has more to do with the encoding end. There is no gap when you divide a piece of music on the recorder. However when I transferred a (divided) Hi-SP recording to it, after transcoding, a gap remained. But this may have been there all along due to the division caused by the transcoding. Generally navigation is good. If you are stopped then holding down FF or RW will skip through track titles at a great rate. If you are playing then FF or RW will skip to next track if pressed and released, or along (like MD) in the current track if held down. I have no experience with the non-MD walkmans so cannot comment relative to your previous experiences. The sound is great (I'm talking about STHQ, MP3 has the predictable high-frequency cutoff) and by looking at wave forms I have satisfied myself that it does better than HiSP for high frequencies. Certainly I can hear the words of songs better (it is styled "voice recorder"). For bass, it's easy enough to turn up the recorder's equivalent of mega-bass, which is more than satisfactory for portable listening. The bass-enhancing menu ("effect") on the device is completely in English (hooray!), and I predict many people will be happy with Bass 1 (out of 0, 1, 2). I've also done nice line-in recording successfully. I have also played the ".msv" files on my stereo (using HTPC) and they sound fine. Direct comparison of the opening of Tosca (Puccini) which is a pretty severe test of any system revealed that HiSP and STHQ (transferred from the HiSP recording) sound about the same, with (as mentioned above) a little more bass in HiSP (without adjustment), and clearer human voice in STHQ. Both on speakers and headphones of the stereo. The manual record level setting big buttons and display) is terrifically clear and easy to see with no Japanese whatever on the display. In fact when playing there is no Japanese visible either. Hope this helps Stephen

If you backed up your recordings that were uploaded to the PC, probably they are gone (unless you were able to decrypt them). Of course this has no effect on what was recorded by you using line or microphone onto MD. You don't want 4.0, trust me. You want 4.3 Ultimate from this site.

As I said you must learn to negotiate the menus. Each level of menu can be traversed by the FF and RW movements of jog lever (or remote), and you descend deeper into the menu with Enter, whilst pressing STOP (the square) will step out one level. To enter the Edit menu, press Enter. And so on.... HTH.

I can now clarify something. I was stupidly opening the Sonic Stage db using Access 97. Access 2000 and later (2003,2007) open the .mdb files just fine. You might want to poke around inside the t_object table and see if you can find anything odd in the filename column, which is headed "203". Stephen

Just try it. Provided you want to scream, throw things at the wall, and collapse in a terrified psychotic heap on the floor after you trashed an entire recording with your favourite music on, gone forever. One small qualification - this is a SonicStage bug, not an M200 bug. So you can erase tracks using the buttons on the M200 just fine.

Hmmm - this function does not appear to be supported. The best you can do is to bookmark the track(s) you want, and then play bookmarked tracks only by cycling through the play modes (this should work for what you want to do, in fact). See page 43 of the manual Good luck!

That one I can do (come and snigger at me not solving the problem of messed up SS database in another thread!) Start by pressing and holding the "display/menu" button on the unit. Now go into the menu as follows (you will become skilled with the "jog lever" very quickly) Edit-> Erase-> Erase Track-> It erases the currently playing track. This is the same functionality on all MD units. Sorry if that seems a little inflexible. The decks are better, but they mostly don't do HiMD. You must be disconnected from USB to do this. If you are connected to USB you can do it from SonicStage, BUT.... there is a big bug. Don't even think about erasing untitled tracks this way (using the computer).

A possible clue here - SonicStage\Packages sounds like a canned directory created by an installation. Is that whole tree read-only, by chance? Better to try something you created yourself. Sorry for coming up with a name that existed already. Try c:\FooBar? (don't forget to create the folder yourself first). At this point I'm almost stumped. Now the only thing I can think of (Avrin, where are you!?!?!?) is that the SS database files are somehow read-only access. See here for a solution. Aha (again)! I just did some messing around, and it's clear that changing that setting doesn't create a new database file there. So wherever the db file is, it simply contains a full path name of the file you imported to your "default location". Unless you tell it to, it leaves other files where they were already, and pointers to the other location in the database. Suppose that file for some reason cannot be added to - the Microsoft Access Database file. This will be enough to mess you up for ever and ever. You'll have to make a new database file and reimport all the existing music into it (the music FILES will be just fine whereever they are located - you don't have to copy all the music files to the new default location, though it gives you an option to do so when you change that setting, I noticed). I think we're getting warm. Sorry to be so slow about this, it's never actually happened to me, but I have seen people complaining about this from time to time. One word of warning.... if any of the files is copy-protected (typically the extension is ".oma" instead of ".OMA" but it's not a universal rule) you might be well to try de-protecting them by running the File Conversion Tool before you mess with anything. Make sure to uncheck the "Copy Protection" box in the first or second screen of that utility. This means that now your files are no longer tied to this install of SonicStage. So worst case you can re-install it. However.... this is a big gotcha .... if the decryption refuses to convert any files, there's a good chance that when you re-install SS you will lose EVERYTHING. Perhaps someone who has suffered this problem before could help here. If you don't care about the previously imported files, then you are fine. What a pain!

Too bad... I was thinking maybe you'd sell it to me for a song (just kidding). Well done.

Here's what I suggest. Try looking at the instructions again, and try to figure out what you thought they meant. Without us prompting you. This probably requires a clear head and a cup of coffee first thing in the a.m. If you can remember that, it's just possible we can figure out if you made an error, and if so, which error. It's even possible we can fix it. Failing that, it's probably time to spend $100 and send it to Sony for servicing. I'm mildly interested in this as I have a very slightly defective RH-910 (it doesn't record on 1GB disks correctly) and am beginning to think that complete realignment might be the only way for myself. Unfortunately the disks and power supplies and laser power meter required come to about $600.

HiSP is good enough? Then I think you will be happy with LPEC STHQ, as am I. I humbly suggest that for $120 on Amazon you could do worse than get your feet wet. This is a very solidly made piece of equipment. (remember 6 or 7 years have passed since HiSP was introduced, and new codecs generally go on improving over their predecessors).

Don't quite understand that. Do you mean: a. it now points to where Sonic Stage originally wanted to put files? or b. You pointed the current location to your newly created directory? This reminds me of my parent who wiped out his masterpiece thinking that "save" meant "restore" and vice-versa. Perhaps we have a terminology disconnect. If you set to the default, there is a good chance that inability of SonicStage software to access that location (somewhere deep inside "C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator") is causing problems. Hope this helps.

I am impressed with these for the transferred, compressed sound. The LPEC STHQ codec is wonderful for whatever you download to it. At least as good as most of the ATRAC codecs. You can also do straightforward line in to these, regardless of the fact that it only appears to sport a mike socket, it does double duty and can be switched to line in. The PCM-M10 is a much heftier beast and I personally would not buy one as a player. I was tempted to get one as a recorder until I chanced on these little beauties. All (incl. PCM-M10) of them support playback of MP3. But the MP3 will always be inferior to ATRAC or LPEC, in my view. With the PCM-M10 you are stuck with MP3 and PCM (which is wildly inefficient in terms of usage as a portable player, and also for transfer speed).

If you transfer the audio (or play it back realtime via USB) is *that* distorted? Edit: sorry, that appears like it might be a silly question if you say the disk works flawlessly in other machines. Perhaps you were trying to lift the volume cap in service mode? The instructions were very explicit and I think I recall someone got confused thinking that some 0x1E (decimal 30) value was something to do with the 30 max volume, when it isn't at all. Avrin is the expert on all this; but you should be able to find a stickied thread here. Wait a minute... here The volume cap was most easily set by changing the "destination" (country) market indicator. Be very careful not to do any resets (that "911" function in the S.M.), or (absent the calibration disks and power supplies) you will end up with a rather valuable paperweight. Stephen

Does that location exist? Can you (using Windows) create arbitrary files and delete what you created, including folders, inside C:\SonicStage? You said you didn't have to log on. Sounds like XP Home. Are you sure that you are a Power User (check and see under the Control Panel "User Accounts"). Sony warns you about this but most people completely miss the warning.

I beg your pardon. Sorry, I never even thought of that one as "blue" it's more like cyan (to me at least). But what a nice piece of engineering. Built like a tank, isn't it?

Hehe you obviously haven't received it yet. It's purple, see my pictorial here Enjoy!

No dice here; 2RH1's and I'm not parting with my EH70 (marvellous little beast). I got it from Star Electronics on Ebay - the guy seems to have a supply of them if you look. Or you can email him and ask. Stephen eg here.... http://cgi.ebay.com/ORIGINAL-SONY-MZ-EH70-MZEH70-HI-MD-PLAYER-/250649307022

(I'm starting to sound like a broken record). I am pretty happy with the tiny ICD SX750 (2GB) and ICD SX950 (8GB). Each about 2 oz (BIG difference from the 13oz PCM-M10). Comes with software to convert CDs, and I have even converted my saved ATRAC files using Sound Forge (supplied). Drag and drop, no DRM, other than a polite warning that this is for personal use, when you copy files from a CD. It even records, with nice built in mikes (3), in PCM, MP3, and (its original purpose) high compression formats for dictation. The least compressed of these (128kbps) is just about perfect for portable listening. I'll let you do the math as to how many hours that gives you. Sony has pretty much decided where it's going. Although this isn't marketed in such a way as to attack the MD market, it's clear they are making the improvements we have begged for (mostly unsuccessfully) for years, not to MD, but to the newer type of unit.

What is that (the upper of the two variable locations) set to right now?

Tools->Options->Location to save imported files