sfbp

My strong impression (reinforced by a recent battle with my "new" NH900) is that the door itself has kind of a weird contact, never mind the bid that touches the battery but how the contact is made from there to the inside of the unit. Applying a little heat very carefully may have burned off the worst. I believe what we are seeing is resistive drop because of the bad contact. Somehow the unit won't sense the battery properly. I suppose one could simulate this by putting a resistor in series, to prove a point. But do clean, preferably with contact cleaner spray, not just the bit that touches the battery + pin but also all the electronics in the sliding battery door. Hope this is useful information, let us know if you can deal with it too. I did win the battle

Sorry, but I really don't think I can ask my aging papa. There's a lot of people here from the UK, maybe one of them might read this. You could ask over on audiotstation.com too. Stephen

If you want to use MD, you really don't have a lot of choice. If you need only to play back some ATRAC files, there are other ways (conversion) and other devices (Flash memory) that will do the job for you. External drive is not a problem. You must go into all the options of the program and make everything you can point there. I suspect you have put one setting to the external drive but others are still pointing to C and whenever it's full, you are in crash-land. However if the external drive is on USB and you are trying to transfer from it to MD, it's possible you have some timing problems. Can your external drive be reconfigured to use SATA (or firewire), or at the very least have its own USB controller?

(this needs to be joined up to the other thread, methinks) When you put the unformatted regular (not 1GB) disk in, you basically caused Windows to crash. That's why you have to set the "disc mode" of the machine to HiMD first. This is a setting on the menu of the NH1. Cheers

There's one on Ebay UK right now. And some batteries too. You'd have to convince the guy to ship to USA or persuade someone here to bid for you. Good luck!

You should be able to make disks in HiMD mode. Check that "disc mode" of the NH1 is set to HiMD. If it's set to NetMD you are definitely out of luck. So as long as these disks aren't for playback on some other unit you should be ok. I don't have either V64 or an NH1 so I can't try it. Try setting the disk mode and then putting in a blank disk and formatting it (using the NH1 itself). Now the formatted disk should show up when you plug the NH1 into the USB port. Nothing to do with SonicStage. You should see the disk as a mass storage device. Now start up SonicStage, and as long as the NH1 isn't called upon to switch modes (to NetMD) you should be ok. In addition if you use a 1GB disk there is no NetMD mode, so it should work straightaway without the formatting step. Let us know. Cheers Stephen

Vista64 or Vista32? NetMD or HiMD? You will have NO luck with Vista64 and NetMD. However if the install didnt put the drivers for NetMD on your Vista32 install, we can help. Incidentally, if you use HiMD **mode** to store NetMD recordings you will get almost 2x as much space as with NetMD disks in native mode. If you are playing back with the NH1, this is no problem (regardless of 32 vs 64). Of course if your target is a car unit with MDLP, then my comment doesnt help you.

Actually my guess is that there are so many people in Japan with MD players that simply want to move their stuff out of the format, that people are renting them to do that (for a week, say). Since you are clearly the adventurous type, I have sent you a PM

One more little thing (I have posted this comment many times but I am still not sure if anyone actually agrees with me yet), in my opinion, the CD ripping to PCM bitrate is so bad you should avoid it, and I routinely use Atrac Advanced Lossless before transferring to other media (well, not CD since CD's are uncompressed, and I might as well copy them CD to CD, which works fine). Quite apart from being about 1/2 size or less of PCM/WAV/1411 rips, these AAL files are NOT protected against moving from one computer to another - and do NOT need to be decrypted ("copy protection removed"). It seems to me, that by the time they introduced this format, Sony had already backed off from making everything super-secret. Stephen

Do tell.... what was the problem? Always helps to expand the knowledge base a bit.....

Be careful, when I last looked many of the RH1's were for RENTAL!

Bottom line: if your ears can tell it's ok, it's ok. Lots of things that ought to sound awful sound perfect and vice-versa. The biggest shock to anyone who has used only MP3 compression is that SP->PCM sounds so good that "I can't believe it's not butter" as the Ads for margarine say. The file conversion tool is only for things that you uploaded by USB into the PC from an MD. I think. Maybe someone will correct me, although I do know that you cannot remove the protection from Connect tunes in this way. You can and should run it to convert anything you uploaded, especially tracks from the precious RH1 (which ain't that solid a beast, sadly), before Sony loses your authorizations. And repeat regularly for new uploads. One remark of yours I don't understand:

That's what I want. My son was in Japan for almost 2 months and didn't get around to looking for me, the brown EH930. Sigh. So the Malaysia operation is now closed? That SURELY means there will be no more RH1's when they run out of supply. How about seeing if someone is selling off the recording (ribbon cable) or even complete main mechanism assemblies?

Importing existing compressed (MP3 or Atrac) files into sonic stage appears to work fine. The only thing that you should remember is to make sure any Atrac files you have are decrypted (File conversion tool) all the time, so you're not stuck on one PC and do not lose the lot when something happens to your registry (like a system upgrade or whatever). The weak point appears to be Sonic Stage's own importing of CD's. They left it on one setting (fast) and when you transcode THAT to LP2, the result is garbage (IMO). Also I would avoid transcoding LP2 to LP4 and vice versa simply because they use completely different encoding techniques. This can be a problem if you have a target on which you wish to put multiple bitrates, however if you leave the setting "as is" that saves a lot of problems. Someone published a way to get 86 minutes out of an MD... google on "Miyadisc". It's on this site somewhere but since the move I generally cannot find things (HINT HINT). Annoying, isn't it. There's some overhead but if you have lots of tracks, the partial frames probably add up to more than 20 seconds. Even if you DID use SP transfer you'd only get the same quality (LP2) as you do now, just Sony didn't 'fess up to padding the sound data with blank bits. The only way would be to play back at x1 from optical (PC) into optical, and you might or might not have to mark the tracks yourself. But it would fit. And you'd get true SP on the device. But 192kbps MP3 isn't so much better (if at all) than 132k Atrac3 that you are likely to see much difference. Be happy.

Edit: Sorry - ignore my comments related to Vista below, because I spotted you said "my XP computer". Silly me. One weirdness - if you have EVER had any NetMD recorders (or indeed HiMD recorders with NetMD disks in them) EXCEPT the RH1 plugged into USB on that computer, you need to follow the instructions in this post And when you are done the de-install part, go back and add the Ultimate version, which is NOT exactly the same as the distribution 4.3 that you must have on your machine. It would help us a lot to tell us about your PC, what Windows version. I recall some weird stuff happening because of UAC in Vista and also that or some other problem in XP SP3 (which I avoided!) though there are fixes to these. 64-bit OS's don't work, except for the "XP compatibility mode" of Windows 7. 32 bit OS's including Windows 7 are ok, but you will have trouble with the NetMD disks in Vista/32. Not sure why, because in Windows 7/32 it works fine. That's NOT to say it cannot be done. But I don't think you are at that stage yet. Reasons it might not be recognised: 1. If you USB is through a hub or docking station 2. You haven't installed the NetMD drivers. I'm really not clear why the install wouldn't have done this, but there is a package pa_drivers.zip, which happens to be there on Avrin's install too. 3. Inadequate power (battery) for the RH1. 4. Remote on RH1 somehow putting it into a mode where it won't respond (incredibly unlikely). You only care about #2 if you haven't done Avrin's install. You CAN do Avrin's install over top of existing 4.3 if you want to save the SonicStage db. However you MUST decrypt files you currently have stored there, just to be safe. You really don't want to lose the lot. This is called starting the "File Conversion Tool" and when you get to the relevant point, you have to UNcheck the magic box that says "Add copy protection" LOL. Give us a bit more about what you have done, and we'll help. DO NOT under any circumstances run Sony's tool to "backup" the library. Heheh.

Just received 10 HiMD media from Josiane in Montreal. Very nice seller, excellent communication, timely shipping, would do business any time. Thanks J Stephen

Actually I think HERE is what you want. Good luck Stephen

Yep, the only difference is the microphone, which is an ECM-DS70P Welcome to the forums!

1. Don't worry; there's a free (or almost free) addon to Windows 7 called XP Compatibility mode. Microsoft lets you run XP applications completely seamlessly (like the old DOS Box). 2. You don't even need it for 32-bit mode. (EDIT: just checked.... MZRH1 upload of LP4 from MDLP disk works perfectly) Someone may challenge one or both of these assertions, and my challenger could be correct. However I'm pretty sure I tried #2, though it's a bit of a hassle to look right this minute. I think someone here actually tried out #1.

As already posted I got a very nice deal on the MZ-RH1 from Jernikfra. I haven't tried it yet but based on the care which he takes with all this stuff, I am certain there will be no reason to retract a statement of 100% perfect feedback. Thanks Jeremy

Great! And no SCMS, either, as it's a pro deck.

I'm not sure that there is a timestamp in pre-HiMD recordings. I think some units handled it (the N910 for example) but Sonic Stage never took notice. It's possible the #linux-minidisc project will do this. I would need to check. Currently they cannot upload Atrac3, I think.

If you're looking for NiMH my recommendation is here

I don't know about that..... http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Sony-Net-MD-Walkman-MZ-N910-Personal-MiniDisc-Player_W0QQitemZ280408140681

Actually there's one more thing - the 707 doesn't have Type-S playback. This is a huge improvement (for LP2 and LP4 playback only), unless you use SP exclusively, I'm a bit surprised you don't notice it. Cheers Stephen