sfbp

Is it possible that some or all of these do in fact work but only in the presence of some missing "plugin" (I don't necessarily mean that formal term which may have specific signficance) and/or registry setting to control it?

Yup, I had good luck with AAL as soon as I tried it, though until now I never understood why. Maybe it's time to try that route from CD->LP2, see y'all after another long stretch shuffling CD's ..... Yes, it works just as expected. So AAL is probably a relatively reliable intermediate for storing in My Library and subsequent transfer to whatever bitrate you like. I guess I'll try your "high quality" modification for 1411kbps import too, just for completeness.

Right, so the observations about gapless playback (which I never cared about) fit nicely. What you're really saying is that the fast rip is good enough to the ears until you try to convert it to lower bit rate, at which point it screws up. IOW the fact that certain people find 1411kbps PCM the only "good" format is really an artifact of Sony's little trick. They're being tricked, as I was. If you do it right, you really only need a much lower bitrate, and the 292kbps of SP is easily good enough for listening on speakers. For portable listening, one can go to LP2 (or as I have recently been astonished to find, LP4) and the quality is amazingly good, once you get rid of the "double conversion" problem. It also explains the odd glitches that everyone including me has seen usually at the beginning of HiMD tracks, up to 1/2 second of audio. That's essentially a "feature" not a bug of this diabolical scheme to prevent us from actually copying, whilst preserving the illusion of quality. I for one don't actually care if my copies are bit perfect. All I ever wanted was something that sounded good enough. I also noticed that high-speed copying on the MXD-D400 resulted in garbage on one particular disk. The CD in question happened to be a re-release of a CD, produced by ArkivMusic after the fact. It looks like such disks are like the Sony rips - not to be relied upon. When I did it again at slow copying speed, it was fine. That in turn suggests to me that 3/4***(see below) of the data in PCM is undetectable by the human ear, which is why SP sounds "good enough". If you follow my rather twisted logic. Cheers added: *** 3/4 referring to the fact that you can copy at x4 without evident losses. This corresponds to 1411/4 = 352kbps, the highest rate offered in HiMD. However for CD->SP it's actually very close to 4/5 (1411/5 = 282, but if you allow for 1024 bits/k maybe this is even closer to the 292 of SP).

I *do* recall noticing that (before I finally learned how to make RH1 work at high speed, thanks to you and your Russian chums) there seemed to be no way to get good music into SonicStage. I noticed it as soon as I tried it, back on my first portable, in 2005. So I went back to my original methodology: - record onto SP minidisc - x1 playback from there into TOSlink - save using CoolEdit (later WaveRec) - load into SonicStage from WAV files - convert to MD compressed formats. SS makes it very difficult with all the copies of files lying around and it's very easy to get rubbish. Sometimes it even picks the bad copy from its store of "optimized files". Once I found my way through the maze, I never bothered much again, until very recently when someone (maybe you) made me realise that the same MD (80 mins) could store the same format (LP2) more efficiently. It always bothered me that stuff that I uploaded never sounded as good. Now I think I understand why, and as of yesterday I can finally achieve what I first tried to do in 2007 after getting the RH1. As I pointed out, Sony directly or indirectly sold me a lot of media since then - neat conspiracy, huh?

Are any of them implemented in the latest Japanese (or, cough! EARLIER) versions of SonicStage? The WMA one sounds interesting - you're saying that it would allow bit perfect copies in My Library, effectively. So that would be even better than "High Quality" setting in conjunction with PCM???

Postscript: I finally ripped 16 hours of CD's again at 132kbps and it sounds absolutely wonderful. WHY OH WHY would Sony say that ripping as WAV is "highest quality" and then do this to us? I also wonder if you folks who listen to PCM exclusively (Wiz and others) actually do their ripping some other way. As far as I can see, importing at WAV using SonicStagemeans you get garbage. Do tell

I have 4 Sony remotes of this general nature RM-D15M - MD only, eject button RM-DC355 - CD only, no eject button RM-D47M - MD only, Eject button RM-D54M -CD/MD (closest to what you have probably), no eject button It seems Sony has some philosophical or practical objection to ejecting CD's from a remote. Hope this helps...

Oh - I saw lots of entries with no assignment so was guessing they were available. I think I see what happens, they only get filled out the first time you select something.

Hey - I'm not obsessive about this. Acceptable is good enough. Thanks for the tip, maybe I will chase that program down. But I am certain that x1 always worked (and RH1 uploads are identical) into the sound card optical in. It just means this is useless for CD ripping. I can anyway handle by throwing them onto D400, just doesn't directly get me onto HiMD. But when I can get a better result by importing to 66kbps than by importing 1411kbps and downconverting in software, something is terribly terribly wrong. Finally I'm mad at Sony - for crippling something so darned obvious.

It looks like you should be able to take over any of the other entries in that list and use them rather than only altering the 90010 category/rate/name.

I would suggest numbering them. This is the approach Sony's software tends to take when importing things anyway. Then you can sort by name, and the number will be the key. Remember that if you have more than 9 songs, you'd better prefix the low numbered ones with "0" This is because "10" comes right after "1" and before "2". However "01" comes before "02" and "10" comes after "09" just as it should. Same problem if you have more than 99 songs, better number starting "001".

I just double-checked - the WAV import still is bad. Does this mean that you cannot import WAV files at highest quality? Very subtle way to restrict us..... At a stroke this explains so many of the oddities I have seen over the last 2 years since I got serious with USB and MD. There is no way to get the highest quality off CD except by making a PCM file yourself using some other tool (eg recording from optical and capturing into .WAV). If you do that, then you actually have master-quality files in the PC. Otherwise, not.

Thanks. I will try repeating the transfer using High quality 66kbps and see if it matches the D400's result. Will changing that registry setting also alter what LP2 transfers do? Seems so weird to me that LP2 sounds bad....... 1/2 hour later: Got it. Finally LP4 sounds as good as what I made at x1 and LP2 sounds way better than that. I'm sure this was the basis on which I junked LP2 as a format when initially using SS and the RH1. After all Sony should be happy that I used a higher bitrate - more MD media sales So the step which is critical is the importing step. What strikes me as weird is that importing the same disk at 1411kbps (which doesn't have a quality setting at all) and then converting **that** yields such an awful result.

Something else - I've just done a little study. It started out as a project to pack all my Bach sacred choral music (I have about 14 CD's all by approximately the same set of forces - Leonhardt/Harnoncourt and some others occasionally) from the TelDec set, onto a single MD. I wish I could afford the entire set, but life would be sooo boring if we could afford everything we wanted. There appears to be no way to record directly from CD onto "HiMD" (ie std md disk in HiMD mode and 1GB disk) in anything other than PCM, HiSP (256k) and HiLP (64k). I had noticed that stuff that I recorded using my JE640 MDLP deck, at LP2 and even LP4 sounded quite good after uploading and saving to HiMD format, leaving the codec as ATRAC3 (132k and 66k respectively). So I thought, let's take CD's, upload the lot as PCM (1411k) and then use SonicStage to output at LP rates to the HiMD. Naturally I picked LP2 since this would just about include all of the content I wanted (limit is 16 hours 30 minutes). So I did this. I was very disappointed in the result. The sound is mushy and unacceptable, probably explaining why a couple of years ago when I first got my RH1, I discarded MDLP in favour of Atrac3+ for saving large amounts of music. So now I got creative, and decided to record from CD to a standard MD at X1 (times 1) using the MXD-D400 which features MDLP rates, direct to LP4 - this being the closest I could find to the recordings I made from internet radio that sounded so good at this rather low bit rate. So I stuck 5 CD's in the changer, connected up the optical out to the D400's optical in. Presto, everything except titles, of course. Now that's only 1/3 of what was on the 1GB disk, but so what? I can always upload and save to that later, since as far as I can tell SonicStage is smart enough to leave MDLP well alone unless you tell it not to. This would give me a massive 32 hours 50 minutes if I really wanted it, on a single MD. Imagine my surprise when I found out that the same pieces recorded on the D400 at lousy bit rate (66kbps) sounded BETTER than than same thing recorded from library-PCM to LP2 (132kbps after conversion) over USB. I'm willing to post samples if you like but I refrained initially from doing so because I feel sure that I'll end up posting something that doesn't reflect the difference I am hearing. Maybe someone can tell me what to post. If it won't fit here, I can easily put it on a webpage, but if this turned out to be right we would probably want it available here on the MDCF pages. Oh yes, the comparison was made in EH70 using RM-35ELK and standard short-lead headphones from Sony. I swapped the disks in and out many times before believing this result. I'm sure there are many variations on what to test but this on its own should be enough to "prove" the point. Maybe I do want to know how to use Simple Burner to burn Atrac3 onto HiMD!! Can it be done???

Well another reason to upgrade is that HiMD is an excellent container for LP2 and LP4... way more space efficient, and SS transfers the files untouched. So stuff you "taped" on your D400 can be uploaded and listened to at leisure (I expect you'll break down and buy an Onkyo but until you do....) My current grump is that the Beeb stopped transmitting at 64kbps, down to 45 and it looks like it is permanent. I got lots to listen to, but sincerely hoping they put it up again.

Don't bother with SP. You cannot download true SP. What you get is "fake" SP which is LP2 with blank bit padding. Yes you can put LP2 and LP4 onto any HiMD unit using Sonicstage. Yes they will play back. No you cannot edit (at least on your D400). From the Mac I guess you are stuck with RH1/M200. However it may be a software issue that you cannot Xfer Atrac3 stuff. Wait for the gang (which is about to include me when I can get the basic development tools going!) and we will have you something that will probably do what you want.

Recommend Avrin's version. Sony US: http://esupport.sony.com/US/perl/swu-list....&SelectOS=7 Sony Europe: http://support.sony-europe.com/DNA/downloa...amp;f=sstage_dl Avrin's Ultimate: http://forums.minidisc.org/index.php?showt...mp;#entry141995

RH1 can upload SP, LP2 and LP4 over USB. It's the only unit that can. The RH10 - well it's very nice, but it cannot. The RH10 has a very nice display but the RH1 is functionally the goods.

The guy's nuts... look at this in his store.....

Apparently you gotta use XP compatibility mode, simple as that. I haven't done it but I think that's all it is. My guess is the right driver gets installed when you run SonicStage as an XP app.

If you look at the list on browser (list is in order) the N10 looks like the first to have it.

rofl - $340 to ship to Canada???????

Yes it does. ChrisG bought one, and either he got that info off the unit, or I found it on the web before that. Basically all portables since Type-S was invented, have it.

So with the judicious use of whatever utility the linux-minidisc folks come up with (I may end up being one of them), one might imagine a fast copy followed by tweaking the bits over USB. Seeing as 80m (but not 1GB, of course) MD's can be read on an SP player (having a contents that say "HiMD") maybe even HiMD could be nicely backed up in the same manner. Mind you, where they are heading, it will be possible just by copying and tweaking the USB-visible image, so probably noone even cares. (Edit: duh, I remember that's no good, the HiMD's are all recorded using PRML so no way to see those bit patterns). Thanks for putting me straight, I think I now recall reading that paragraph.

Thanks, Philippe. Question: what does the MDS-W1 do to MDLP data? If you don't know, is there a way you can find out? It occurs to me that maybe it will copy a 5 hour 23 mins LP4 disk perfectly. I ask this because I have recently been extremely surprised by the fact that I can record at LP4 off a decent source, upload the files intact to SonicStage, and store the lot on a HiMD disk saving a huge amount of real estate in the process - and the result sounds no worse than when I first got it off the radio. IE - the only thing bad about LP4 is that it is totally LOSSY; whereas if you don't touch it at all, maybe it is fine. This might be true for a copy made with MDS-W1 (I noted on another Ebay seller's spiel that copying of LP disks was claimed for the Denon dual device that heads this discussion).