sfbp

No, they were not. Straight from WAV files using the convert function provided by Sony.

I'm still trying to figure it out - worked even on machine that AFAIK did not have SS installed, ever. Also - and this seems odd, at least to simple moi - playback of AAL files was handled without so much as a hiccough. By WMP. Now THAT needs some explaining, please......

Agree. Agree. No way. The unencrypter puts the files in the exact same folder the DRM'd version was , with .OMA extension instead of .oma. Maybe this is due to some setting and if so, I would be glad to try and figure out what it is. I note in passing that I never check the box that says "Delete the source (OpenMG) files after conversion". On my machine no sorting whatsoever is required, assuming they were well-organized after upload but before conversion. This I had forgotten about. Care to remind us what steps, if any, have to be followed to make this happen, and to which version of WMP they apply? I have steadfastly refused to upgrade from V.9 after hearing that some things got worse - was that the right thing to do? It still prompts me with monotonous regularity at the end of each session..... Added: I tried it from both machines that already run SonicStage, so I guess that was enough. Sadly I don't think I have one with WMP9 that hasn't ever had a SS install on it.... if that matters.

The files are already IN LP2. So it doesn't matter what you do with them, unless you keep them as LP2 the sound will get worse. It's not clear to me that introducing *any* new format such as FLAC is going to help that problem in the least. If you want to keep on hearing them as they sound now, keep a MD player around. If you can get a HiMD you can at least get 16+ hours (of LP2) on a 1GB disk. I can vouch for the fact that the quality does NOT degrade when you upload LP2 or LP4 with the RH1 and then transfer those files intact to HiMD.

There's a nice 940 on for 70GBP BuyItNow... alas I am not very good with circuit diagrams, and I really don't know from looking how easy it would be to modify the 940/Europe to run on 110V. The other problem is shipping but it's not impossible to work something out, I bet.

Looks like you're in luck, but often these decks are hard to find in North America. I refrained from posting a link. Go for it! The JE640 is quite decent and has all the features you need, I have one. So if you can't get a JB940 there ain't much difference between them. The 640's seem to pop up slightly more often here. There are lots of used 940's in UK. However: 1. they are for 220V/50Hz and it's not clear to me how easy that mod is 2. they are "specially adapted for the UK" - whatever that means. I have no clue if #2 makes them worse on 110V/60Hz.

You can sit with headphones on and change their titles on the MD before you upload them. Any time you're not sure of a track, you listen to it and compare, using the position on the MD and the sound of the music to cross-correlate what you have got. As they are non-HiMD tracks, they will always play on the MD rather than on the PC at this juncture. Once you have titled them on the MD, the upload will keep the title. Furthermore you can put them in groups on the MD, and title the groups. Doing this ensures that they arrive in the same group (each group becomes an "album") on the PC. Further, once they are on the PC, you can add the artist names and such. The only problem with this is that the default for SonicStage sorting is by Artist, so tracks that you mislabel have a habit of running away from you. Finally, one strong recommendation: use the "As is" setting when importing them. This makes sure that, since LP2 is a lossy format, nothing bad happens to them as a result of conversion. Of course when you finally make them into MP3 files, you are almost guaranteed to find that the sound is not great, but at least you can postpone it a bit - the uploaded tracks should at least sound as good as they do now when played on any other MD. If you do all this, and need to convert them to MP3 or WAV, you can choose the destination of that conversion, later.

The short answer to the main part of your question is: you can't. However if you bought a HiMD, AND you created the tracks on the disk yourself (live recording) in HiMD format (ie not SP, LP2 or LP4) then you CAN upload them. Also if you bought an MZ-RH1, and you recorded things NOT from SonicStage in SP, LP2 or LP4, these ALSO can be uploaded. All other bets are off. With a "genuine" NetMD (ie anything before HiMD) you simply cannot send anything to the computer via USB. Hope this is what you need to know. To get the exact answer you probably need to tell us your exact model number. Cheers

The linux-minidisc project prog QHiMDTransfer probably will do it in its present form. Wait a few weeks and it will do it properly.

Apparently not as lossy as ripping CD's into SonicStage at PCM I sure hope that's not what you do, Oz.

Should be (is) on the same server as this board. Something got lost in the wash.........

Update: did all that, and it worked.... sort of. What's bizarre is that now the driver list shows (only) NETMD033.SYS regardless of whether I have RH1 or NH700 connected. I will do some more checking, maybe some legacy of me fiddling around before. Update: I figured out what happened. With those files gone from WINDOWS\INF the effect is that now I end up picking the driver file by hand. This is perfectly fine, except that i did it wrong because instead of choosing the file, it saw NetMD and picked the first one, which happened to be 033. When I deinstalled and picked 052. it worked as it should. However this is suboptimal, trying to explain this to anyone who doesnt know what they're looking for is almost impossible. I am supposing that the program CopyInf.exe has to be run... but I didn't since maybe it takes parameters???? Stephen

What am I comparing in the content? Driverver= <date>,x.y.zz.nnnnn ? The odd one out seems to be ; Sony Network Walkman(E) ; Copyright 1999-2001 Sony Corporation [Version] Signature="$CHICAGO$" Class=USB ClassGUID={36FC9E60-C465-11CF-8056-444553540000} ;CatalogFile=nwwmusb.cat CatalogFile.NT=nwwmusb.cat Provider=%NWWMUSB.Provider% DriverVer=07/05/2001,1.3.00.07090 None of which is in the Personal Audio Driver folder. Oh yes there's an E7 driver there too. All the others are exact copies under different (as you say, OEMxx) names. Deleted the whole lot from the WINDOWS\INF folder (there were 11 in all, and 11 .PNF files too).

Bad news. I recently installed the Ultimate over top of my main SS installation. It worked fine for 2 weeks or so. Now I'm back to the double-driver-install problem and slow uploads unless and until I delete the drivers as previously discussed. Any suggestions on how to diagnose this one, Avrin?

It's supported to the extent that burning an MD from this always works well. It seems to be a good intermediate for every kind of ATRAC all the way from (at least) 66kbps to 292. I haven't tried 48 or 352 but according to what my ears tell me, I wouldn't want the first and don't need the second. I see no reason why the conversions should not be possible (sorry, double negative) but am not currently concerned with the codec side of the project. Cannot be, in fact, until they have got all the encryption going, which is a fiendish mathemagical feat.

Are the files unnamed on the RH1? SonicStage turns "untitled" into a date/time stamp for a name, which is what ends up on the PC. Try naming them, anything at all, with the portable (disconnected of course). a,b,c,d,e would be good names. Then you should get a.wav, b.wav etc. There's rename in QHiMDTransfer but it ain't working yet.

One more thing - the slowest step in firing up W7 is the download. Once you've made a bootable disk, it took all of 10 minutes to load install and configure itself. It seemed to get all the drivers right. Maybe if I'd had the RH1 plugged in (in NEtMD mode) it would have found that too, who knows? I think they're on a roll with this one finally.

One final note: I just finished installing W7 RC 32 bits. When I was done, the Sonic Stage install out of the box from Sony coped with HiMD just fine, but the NetMD drivers were missing. I needed the drivers from the file pa_driver.zip which is to be found here on MDCF forums. Then upload from the RH1 worked just great!

The problem is, I think, that the heavy duty encryption used means that all sorts of irreversible recalculations have to be done before the disk image (and that is all it is) gets rewritten. Granted you can put a bunch of trackmarks without triggering it, but that's about all, I think. In particular the HiMD system doesn't like it too much when you move stuff from one group to another, I think (not sure yet) it encodes the group ID in such a way that the file isn't uploadable without the right group header. Time and experiment will tell. Meantime don't THINK about moving tracks from your live recording between groups.

Really, you do NOT want 4.2 with Vista or W7. You MUST use 4.3, whether the Avrin version or the downloaded one. I think but am not sure, that I used the download from Sony. Try renaming the SonicStage installation for now. It's more likely that what is going on is that W7 reads the XP registry to figure out stuff like this. In which case, deinstall may be your only option. Oh, you are running 32-bit W7, I take it? If you run 64-bit W7 I could be wrong but guessing that all bets are off. I haven't tried it, but user 1kyle (here) has. One more detail, I didn't in fact do anything special to set it in XP compatibility mode. W7 appears to be smart enough to figure that out from the executable all on its own. And it's definitely not the Avrin Ultimate on that machine, everything is 4.7.<whatever>

New from battery store may actually be OLD from battery store as these are getting rare. Certainly had that trouble with a new one I purchased from store here. You might do better on the web (look at the link in my post in this thread). However the general strategy is to run them down as much as possible and then recharge. Better recharging with a charger. Mine is (on recommendation from many members here) a GP charger which I bought with 2 gumsticks. Scratching the contact with steel wool or a very sharp object such as an exacto knife may help. Be careful though! Hope this helps.

Yeah, mentioned that 3 posts or so up

What????? I just checked (had been meaning to turn on W7 again so I could upgrade to the Release Candidate from the Beta, since the RC is good for a whole year whereas the beta expires in a month or so). My installation of SonicStage is perfect on there. Maybe I did it from the download, I don't recall, rather than the Avrin-ultimate (which as you know I recommend highly). But it works just fine. I'm trying to recall if I did anything special. When I have upgraded to RC I will reinstall SS and let y'all know the result. Added: I had previously captured Atrac3+ (HiMD) tracks from a portable onto there. I just now tried Atrac3 (LP2, in fact) upload from my MZ-RH1. Worked perfectly. I *did* see that the program was set to "XP Service Pack 2" compatibility mode. But that's the only thing unusual. I don't recall if I did that myself or whether install did it for me.

Fair enough Avrin. Your detailed explanation as always right on the $$$. I must admit that all my current CD players will in fact play CD-R's that I have made but CD-R's are cheap enough that I don't bother with CDRW any more (I used to when CD-R's were a couple of dollars each). The transfer (to RH1) of SP via USB connection (from Sonic Stage) takes a very long time, so I actually thought more data was being transmitted over the interface. You're saying that the slowness arises because the portable unit has to do a lot more work. Clearly the better way is optical at x1, regardless of whether we are using deck or portable. The interesting question is the combo decks at x4, whether they throw information away. The fact that the MDS-W1 and the Denon pro copying double deck seem to copy at high speed suggests that the x4 somehow gets away with it. I'm not sure how....

Try my (new) method. I think you will be surprised. AAL->PC, LP2->S1. If they are perfectly ripped to begin with, maybe even the FakeSP will sound good.... after all, it's really LP2 by another name. But starting from what is already on your hard disk, no way, for now don't trust that.