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welcome to MDCF! Question 1: simple answer NO. However - a. if you get a HiMD unit you can actually transfer up to 352kbps Atrac3+. b. if your unit has Type-S playback (look in the specs, OR any HiMD unit does as a matter of course) then 132kbps should be easily adequate for portable listening. It IS possible to record SP into any MD unit (they all have optical in except the ones with D for downloader in the name eg DH710, NH600D). Many people agree that this is superior. However I am beginning to be sceptical. As long as you are careful you can get excellent quality at LP2. The critical step is NOT to try importing CD's as WAV using SonicStage. Almost any other route works great (Simple Burner LP2, Atrac Advanced Lossless import into PC) but the WAV file you get from a direct import is hopeless. Question 2: depends on the soundcard. I use the Terratec Aureon Fun 5.1, and I can do exactly as you say. Of course there's still titling to do.

Unfortunately I think the simple answer is no. However you can do the renaming on the disk before upload, while it is in the RH1. Would that do the trick? Regards Stephen

Well, I thought I had better write this one up properly. In another thread I noted that I purchased a MINT MZ-NH900 that the guy had clearly never used. The gumstick battery only worked after a lot of persuasion (cleaning of contacts), and then it would power up for 1 minute or 2 and then rapidly report "LOW BATTERY". Funny, because: a. the gumstick was still fully charged as reported by its ability to play in other unit(s), and the short length of time it took for the GP charger to restore it to "green light" state (ie charged) after reinsertion in the charger b. the power seemed to be fine when running on 3VDC charger, or USB, or sidecar battery case with (even) NiMH AA battery. If 'twere not for b. I might have thought that some setting in the NVRAM needed to be changed, to "allow" it to recognise the current from the battery. But the machine was mint after all. After trying various things (including recording for 8 hours straight to see if the machine simply needed to be burned in), I eventually concluded that the source of the problem must be a simple resistive drop at the contacts to the +ve of the battery. Thinking "here goes nothing" I took out the battery, and opened the battery door, and applied intense heat from the soldering iron, to those contacts with the idea that perhaps it might burn off what ever was increasing the resistance. BINGO! I now have a perfectly working, "brand new" MZ-NH900. Just thought you'd like to know about this trick. Stephen

Thanks. The power problem seems to be worse than I thought, I think it might be related to that anyway. With a fully charged NiMH gumstick (that works perfectly in other units), it doesn't properly recognise the battery for more than a few minutes. Giving the "empty" sign after about 2 mins and then switching off completely within 5. Taking the battery back to the other unit (or to the GP charger), it still shows full. However it runs just fine off the AA external, or off USB, or off 3VDC in. Maybe I need to post a separate thread, but I need to know if this is an adjustment (settings) thing, or a cleaning thing.

My first MZ-NH900. What a neat little device! Alumin(i)um upper body, looks like, though the lower body is definitely plastic. The one I got was in mint (completely unscratched, no sign of wear on any buttons or jog dial) condition, save for one thing: the NiMH gumstick battery didn't work. The usual cleaning of the contacts on the door seemed to fix it. I find the display is a bit faint but either it recovered a bit or I got used to it. One gotcha, I tried to take it apart to look inside at the battery connx, but got stuck because the door seems to be in the way of getting the bottom case off. There is a cryptic comment in the service manual about unsoldering something, but I wasn't going to do that

Huh? This model doesn't accept a 3V input, does it?

The only "decent" way to extract these tracks (except with MZ-RH1, and even that is not guaranteed if they were put there by the USB-based software SonicStage to begin with) is by optical out from an MD deck. You need a particular type of deck (one that supports MDLP and has an opti-out connector). In addition you may well need one that PREdates NetMD, otherwise you may run into some silly restrictions Sony added. Models include JE640, JB940, and a few others. You can research this in the equipment browser at http://www.minidisc.org/equipment_browser.html If the tracks are not in MDLP, ie SP, then ANY MD deck with opti-out will do. Should be way better than using line out, as it avoids hum/ground loops. Oh yes, one more thing, this route will require a sound card on your PC with optical in.

You asked if you could do it. The answer is yes. With the Sony MZ-RH1. You ask now if you can do it with your Sharp. The answer is no. Sorry about that.

You can definitely take LP4 from MD to PC, the upload leaves it completely unchanged, if you have the MZ-RH1. I do it quite routinely for internet radio broadcasts recorded on an MDLP deck; I then store the LP4 file in HiMD "format" on another MD (or an Atrac CD) as this saves a lot of space.

Well the problem may be with the way in which SonicStage handles the conversion of the MP3 files. Another bug it has, you have valid files (eg .WAV) that play in SoS quite fine but won't transfer. In that case, deleting them from the SoS catalogue (make sure you leave unchecked the boz that says "delete music files from this computer") and reimporting them works fine. It might be the same silly thing happening with MP3 files, I really don't know, as I have never bothered to do it with MP3 files. To be sure I might convert to WAV first and then let SoS do the compression from WAV->ATRAC.

You cannot transfer TO the PC. Period. (well, with this device). You might have a driver problem if you cannot transfer from PC to minidisc. We need a bit more information to be able to help. Stephen

There is no workaround involving SonicStage IF the track was made by SonicStage to begin with. No NetMD track that was transferred to a portable MD has ever been transferred back to a PC. This is by design. When you "transfer them back" it is deleting the content from the portable (NetMD) and incrementing the transfer count on the PC, assuming you never deleted the copy on there. If there's no copy on the PC, you are stuck. However if you have a deck with optical out, a sound card with optical in, and don't mind playing all the disks through, you can capture them in your PC with WaveRec or some other software (I've never used Audacity) such as CoolEdit or Adobe Audition. This is a pain, as you will have to subdivide and retitle everything - however for irreplaceable stuff it does work. If the tracks were made by recording (Mic or LineIn) then buying an MZ-RH1 will do the trick. It will allow these SP,LP2 and LP4 tracks to be uploaded to the PC. It's the ONLY model that allows this. However anything recorded in the HiMD format should be uploadable on any HiMD device. It's not impossible that in time someone will come up with a fix for the inability to upload these downloaded NetMD tracks with the RH1, as the restriction is just in the headers, which need rewriting. The actual sound data on the disk is NOT encrypted. Hope this helps. Stephen

Not quite true, IMO. In fact I find the group skip on most other remotes gets pushed by accident, and wish I could disable it To skip a group you need do no more than scroll (with the scroll wheel) to the end of the group, whereupon the 40ELK shows you groups rather than tracks. Now you can press the Enter lever for one of the other groups, and you can scroll through that group until you find exactly the track you want to skip to. All this whilst still listening to the track in the first group you are getting tired of. So I actually think they did it right.

Gotcha. Couldn't see it in the browser because I didn't figure out where to look (in the pro section).

What's that interesting-looking piece of equipment in the middle of your picture? Doesn't look like any that I am familiar with.... Stephen

I'm having trouble with one of my N910's. The variable power supply from the local store doesn't work. The only power supply that works with this particular one is the Sony. I think some setting needs to be changed in service mode. The second N910 works fine with either power supply. So I am thinking that perhaps it senses the voltage (either of its own battery, or of the external supply) before deciding whether to charge or not. If I put the variable PS to 4.5 volts, it KNOWS it is too high, and gives me a message. But set on 3V it simply does nothing when I plug in and press the CHG ("stop") button. I bet Avrin knows what is wrong. One more thing: it's only charging which is affected - the unit RUNS fine off the charger.

I did try it finally: it installed without problem. However there must be something wrong installed (OpenMG version?) because it crashes without trace every time I try to execute it. I think that probably originally it worked without SS, but that the sequence of SS->SB installs ends up with the right selection of support software because the SB install doesn't replace the baseline stuff from the SS install (because the latter is newer). As I suspected, installing SS on top of it fixed the problem. Sigh. Probably Avrin can tell us how to install only OpenMG of the right version. But for now it doesn't matter that much. I just was hoping it might be simple... but life never is.

I'm trying to help someone at long distance who basically has computer-phobia. I am hoping at least initially to see if I can get him started on SimpleBurner without installing SonicStage first. As I've never tried it, I wonder if someone can tell me if it is possible. I've run out of machines that are completely free of Sony components. I was working on the assumption that the SS install would have to be run first (yes, he has a copy of "Ultimate"), but then it occurred to me, maybe not. Thoughts please? Cheers Stepen

Yeah I think so. The last fix I suggested would probably stop that behaviour.

So it *was* trying to go to a website and failing !?!?

Just at a slight tangent: Take a look at the keys in the following registry file (it should be called connect.reg, not connect.reg.txt but that's the joy of uploading). connect.reg.txt Now look with REGEDIT in your own system and see if this key HomeUrl exists. You could save it (export) from your system first. Then I might try deleting it from your registry. The whole key, ie the folder-thingy you can see in Regedit. I think there's some silly problem where SoS invokes some IE component (.DLL) to access the Connect Store. I got in the same mess when I tried to mess with the URL field in that last key. AFAIK SoS can do quite fine without any of this. Alternatively you could try pointing the URL somewhere else, but I have no idea what the other fields do. Hope this helps! Stephen

Agree that generally W7 works smoothly, way better than Vista. Off the top of my head I would guess you have some lingering network configuration issue. Look in the Event log, I don't need to tell you where that is I saw lots of (I think) 4373 messages because of access control on a network. Once I turned off auditing Security failures that helped quite a bit. I also had some strange issues with the Sata drive I added to my machine to run W7 without getting rid of the original boot drive. The big change in W7 is that many small components get started on the fly (eg opening a dialog box is like running a small program). The consequence is that any time you have some path in the search order that causes hangups (like a network share you used in the path that's not there), you will have trouble. Hope this helps Stephen

If you have everything working, simply unprotecting the files will make them playable on any machine that runs SonicStage. Of course if you have only live recordings, yes, WAV would be good, but of course it takes up a lot of space. Glad you got sorted. Welcome to the forums!

I recall suffering this. The problem arose from a series of silly things I did, culminating in a System Restore I did (Windows). That generated the mess you are in, IIRC. There are two components to what is wrong: 1. The keys to your installation need to be revalidated 2. The revalidation server is usually (but not always) offline these days. Very strange! It may be that you have lost all .oma files that were not decrypted. Sadly very few outside this community here realise the key fact, that you must decrypt all your files regularly. If there is any way to roll back SP3, that would be the first step. Then you should (hopefully SS will now work) do the decryption (Sony refers to it as "file copy protection"), and then get rid of SonicStage whilst saving its database. Reinstalling it should now give you what you want. However any files you got from Connect, which have REAL drm that you can't get rid of, would have to be somehow exported (I think they can be turned to MP3 or WAV but I am not sure as I have never had any) first. I strongly suggest you wait and see if anyone can elaborate on this; in particular Avrin is quite knowledgeable about the details of this stuff. Welcome to MDCF! Stephen

You could start by telling us the symptoms. These units are all considered "antique" now, and if you pay Sony or someone to fix it, it may be expensive. On the other hand, the service manuals are here on this site, and lots of folks who may know more about your particular problem, if you tell us what it is? Does it still play back? Does it record? Does the screen show activity (or the remote if you have one with LCD) that something happens when you try to do these things? Can it be connected via USB to the computer, and can the computer (Sonic Stage) read a disk on the NH700? Cheers Stephen