sfbp

No idea. Never cared about gapless, sorry. SonicStage's USB->SP is LP2 with blank bit padding ("Fake SP"). Better results with optical or on combo decks. I just reread my previous post. What a mouthful of initials, alphabet soup isn't it?

I think OP knows that the SP thus generated is Fake-SP and as such is less than wonderful. However my recent researches show that the weak step in NetMD is the CD ripping (at least for most people running Sonic Stage on most people's CD or DVD drives) depending exactly on how it is ripped. With good ripping LP2 should be fine for portable and in-car listening, in fact it is totally amazing to me. SP has also the disadvantage it uses a lot more battery. Try ripping to AAL (Atrac Advanced Lossless) and then convert that to NetMD LP2 using USB on your S1. Tell us (well, me) how you get on! Stephen

That must qualify you for some sort of record! Well done, and welcome to MDCF.

Atrac Advanced Lossless. Really good codec that does decent RIP from CD and saves space. Not encrypted.

Did you find the manual? Looks like lots of explanation how the USB shared drive works. If you have XP you won't need any drivers for the PC.

No idea. Guessing there's some sort of setup for the partition that's recognised by Korg and also externally as USB. Get one and you will get the other

I believe there's an EH930 (though I don't have one). Someone here does, though. Denon DMD-M50 as just purchased by GuitarFxr Sony MZ-DN430 Sony MZ-DH710 (may be the same as RH710 minus optical and line input) That's all I can think off of top of head but there are at least 5 or 6 more that I failed to find in the last 6 months. Yes, it's fun finding these oddities!

It's possible they improved support for AAL which I have discovered in my dotage recently, as a fantastic alternative to ripping PCM from CD's (the latter absolutely fails on all my CD drives). I recall trying to get that to work in 4.2 and it failing. But again I bow to Avrin who really knows these details.

I never heard of this beast and it's not MD. But from the product description I would simply save .WAV files to the second drive however that is done. Then as you say, connect a USB cable to your PC, which should immediately recognise that drive (actually its just part of the main one) as an external and you can simply open them with Windows utilities or copy them to PC's main drive. Why oh why couldn't Sony have done this?????????????

the major attraction of Avrin's version is that the slow upload from RH1 seems to be (mostly) gone. I had one case where after plugging in a non-RH1 the problem still happened, and I haven't diagnosed it yet. But if you don't have an RH1 from which you do SP uploads, you may not care. I will say that I have used 4.3 from the moment it came out, and with the exception of this feature it was always reliable for me under XP pro. But all earlier versions did that too.

Beethoven Cello Sonata #3 in A major Op. 69, played by Paul Tortelier and Eric Heidsieck. Recorded to JE-630 (at SP) from the original 1972 LPs, uploaded to PC from MZ-RH1. Noise-reduced the resultant wavefiles using CoolEdit, deleted the .oma's and re-imported to SonicStage as .wav files. Burned to CD using SonicStage, just to see if it works (usually I use Nero), along with some much lower quality chamber music from SS (Violin sonatas and a piano sonata, some originally recorded at LP2 some at LP4 off the internet), to fill out a second CD. Copied using MXD-D400 to 74 minute JVC at LP2. Deleted the low quality music and re-burned to the MD directly from SonicStage without conversion. (the LP4 sounded awful upconverted to LP2 by the CD->MD process). The result is absolutely perfect. I cannot believe how well this technology improves old recordings! This recording is pretty much a reference for this music. Tortelier even did the whole lot on TV which I remember being fascinated by.

So the 510 was the last one to display this self-exhausting behaviour? Actually there is the JA30ES and the PC1, both relatively uncommon, in between, according to the browser list. Interestingly, when you press REC with no disk in on the 630 and 640 (didnt check the 520 it is in mothballs at the moment) you get "A->D" on the menu and pass through of whatever input (optical or digital) to all output connectors. But on the D400 you have to have a disc in there before this works. I guess you're saying that it is "safe" to do this as the motor is not working during pause.

My results seem quite consistent with an across-the-board degradation introduced by Sony. Perhaps they will say that management was pushing for high rip speeds or something. The fact is, when the same disk is ripped to one of Sony's proprietary codecs, rather than PCM which is only a small step away from what's on the CD, the sound is wonderful. The other oddity is that they never pushed a data rate around 128kbps on HiMD. I am finding the LP2 sound is just perfect for portable listening (it always seemed it on NetMD recorders) with the Ipod-like ability to hold a huge amount on a single 1GB disk. Yet noone at Sony appears to have anticipated that anyone would need to put LP2 onto HiMD as a matter of routine, and that rate is not there in Simple Burner. (or did you tell us all a way to do this, and I missed it?) I recall writing a post saying that the Type-S support for Atrac3 was perhaps missing from HiMD. That is clearly wrong - the difference is in the initial upload. Using AAL as the target on the PC, LP2 always sounds great. I haven't tried LP4, but the non-transcoded uploads of things actually *recorded* at LP4 sound very good, when played back under HiMD.

But can you write to the other disks? If one recorder isn't writing (specifically to 1GB disks) then you should be able to reformat the failing one in another recorder that's not bust.

I presumed that if it wouldn't upload tracks with encryption not installed then installing the encryption would then make the encrypted tracks be uploadable. Sigh, to upload unencrypted tracks you still need encryption, what a bunch of saddoes are Sony! Sorry about that.

I balked because I turned one down at $100 Can about a year ago. Since then I have stocked up on other units. I am simply not interested at that price. I have no idea whether this is the prevailing opinion. It still doesn't upload like the RH1, as aesthetically pleasing as the unit is. Good luck on Ebay - the units there certainly fetch a lot sometimes.

Don't forget the SP codec lives on the MD unit (only). All the units that actually have optical out first decode it back into 1411kbps/44.1Khz std CD stereo format before it goes anywhere. Even the RH1 uploads pure PCM 1411. So at some level it is the firmware which decodes it, I think. Whether the firmware can be tricked into sending PCM over USB is a good question. Now I've got it compiled and working (using NH700 initially since that's what the developers had), I am pleased to say that it works fine with encrypted PCM and an RH1. You won't get any other format (except unencrypted PCM) to upload right now though it should be possible to read the catalogue on any HiMD disk you insert. Std disks (SP,LP2,LP4) won't work at all, lot of work to be done first.

Question: have you tried another 1GB disk? It may be that the unit is not recognising it as HiMD somehow (not sure how, but there is a sensor or microswitch that looks at holes in the bottom of the disk to see what sort of disk it is - there is one hole that is quite different between HiMD and Std 80m MD, presumably this one).

It's being worked on. Noone knows (yet) whether transfer FROM NetMD is going to be possible. Search for "linux-minidisc" in the forum and posts by "cbmuser". As you discovered, the NHF800 is fine for new, HiMD recordings upload.

Will do. However I can tell you, now I think back that I have seen this dramatic loss of quality on three completely different CD drives, all on relatively high-powered computers. I still think think that Sony is playing games with us, since the AAL and all the other compressed rips work so well.

Hello, World! (It came up and read a minidisk)

So you are saying my observation is simply some weird artifact? I agree, in a sense - it is an artifact of Sony not ripping my CD's properly in their highspeed mode to WAV.

Agree, yes thanks to Aaron. I was rather assuming that. But (only) sorting them won't have the desired effect unless: a. all the files are in a single directory (folder); and b. all are numbered (unless you want to have them in alphabetical order, which is quite possible, I suppose).

Presumably they were already numbered, then?