sfbp

Sounds like the recipient has got the WAVE volume slider on sound control at the other end turned way down. You're going to have to get that person some serious technical help

Forget all the advice about getting standalone version from here and needing version 4.2 of SS. Your version 2.0 is a valuable antique, I am not surprised you are frustrated with it. First go to the proper place to get sony download which is here: Link for SS4.3 download If there's problems with that, try talking to someone here about a standalone installer. But this should do the trick and is probably done by everyone except a very few. Good luck!

I have seen this behaviour. Do you have the songs in something other than Atrac? eg WAV, mp3 already, and trying to transfer them to MD device.... If so, delete from SS (don't delete the actual files just the catalogue entry) and re-add them. All should be well.

It sounds like you have expectations related to Itunes. What Itunes can NOT do is the subject of a long and as-yet unwritten tome to which the members of this forum will (I assume) gladly contribute. If you don't need the features of Minidisc, you probably don't need Minidisc. The most important of which is sound quality. We all know that SonicStage is a kludge, but if you stay within limits it does what you need to a lot better and a lot faster than anything comparable, on or off a PC. If you don't need to record, edit, change pitch/speed .......... My 16-year old has owned a succession of Ipods. One day I gave him my cheapest unit, the MZ-NE410 to have a listen to, with a disk in it with some chamber music on. His reaction: "Holy Crap".

... which in turn makes the NH1 tied to a given power regime, correct? That's one thing that stopped me - an NH1 bought for European charger is not much use over here, and the power supply is different. Mind you I suspect the power supply could be obtained, I was just turned off by having Yet Another Incompatible Device, given that all the other MD's I have except the RH1 work off the same 3V power supply (and also one that I have for the car).

Maybe you should tell us what country you are in (and therefore what mains power it may require - granted for all I know this might happen to be switchable). Thanks

With respect, I disagree. 1. You lose more than "a small quality loss" by going analogue. You lose the whole point of MD, digital sound as well as it has ever been manufactured for consumer use at reasonable prices. Compared to the prices charged for earlier units, the lowest street price for a new RH1 is not bad. 2. There is group functionality. It just isn't on the unit itself, only via the remote. Certainly the most valuable option to me is to start a new group every time I push REC. Combined with the automatic track marking this is a good, if not ideal setup for recording live when you have no idea what is the format of what you are about to hear. 3. Ditto for bookmark functionality, use the remote. 4. I believe that 3-line display is possible using the 40ELK, which is compatible. Also there are some interesting display options that I don't remember from other units. As far as the jog lever goes, my theory is that if you don't understand how it works, the normal tendency is to push on it too hard - which I did. Fortunately I stopped using this as a player just before I realised that in one direction (only) the jog had gone icky. Everything works. Maybe as Storm Shadow says about other aspects of the RH1, even this could be cured by cleaning. Your original idea of keeping it for uploads (and live recordings at PCM, which I do in addition), means it will last. So might an NH700 but you will have difficulty obtaining one in the US. And the RH1 is your link to all other recordings made with legacy units. As Microsoft proved, backwards compatibility is one very important key to success, and there are so many zillions of MD out there that it does seem reasonable Sony will make one unit (this one) for a good while. Nevertheless I wouldn't count on it. Stephen

Interesting-looking gadget! It looks like there is no support for Atrac3+, though? However in essence the drive corresponds to the computer I use for Sonic Stage. I wonder whether there will be any more of these, or if this was a one-off. You can see all the ancestry from the MD decks. Thanks for this. I had no idea it existed.

Probably just fine. You will record in mono, presumably? As an SP-only unit, the only way to get more than 80 minutes on a single disk. Also there are lots of R91's (or R90 perhaps) on the market, with all the same features, and for not much $$$. They are probably more solidly built as they were a more expensive model. I have the R91 and I really like it. Seems to record from mike OK.

Minor problem, I am currently mulling over writing a systemic expose on which types of recordings really benefit from Type-S playback and therefore are OK in LP2. And on which units. I tried the LP-HiMD trick, recording at LP2 on HiMD. So far I am completely underwhelmed by the effective sound. I'm not sure what the problem is. All the HiMD units are supposed to "include" Type-S" technology. But do they really? YMMV.

However without the hack from here you won't have optical out from the JE480. Only the JE 780 (and JB980) has that (there's one on Ebay UK at the moment, and I am curious to see how much it goes for). Stephen

IMO the native LP2 playback is not worthy of the term HiFi (ie onto and amplifier and speakers). It's probably fine for portable listening, at least with the phones I use, which are nothing special, standard Sony. However with Type-S the result starts to match "legacy" (ie SP) minidisc recordings. Yes, it doesn't matter where they were encoded. However it seems likely that SonicStage does a better job than a deck, which may be limited by the power of the compressor which is implemented essentially in hardware, and has to be completed in real time. If I wanted to "recover" LP2 recordings (currently this isn't a problem for me) I would be tempted to see what the optical out signal on my Type-S deck looked like when I read it into the computer. I'm honestly not certain whether the Type-S enhancement has been done by that point in the playback, but I am guessing yes.

Egg-zactly.

I just confirmed this on the next disk I processed similarly. That is, I got a failure whenever I tried to delete more than one "untitled" track, without physically removing the unit from USB, causing (I think) its directory to be refreshed. If I label the same tracks as A,B,C, without removing it, it still fails. I didn't trash the disk this time, heheh. But If I take a disk (no failure yet) and label a bunch of tracks and then delete them, no problem. Once it has failed once, it keeps on failing. And the failure is ONLY connected to deleting "Untitled". Grrrr.

Not much help to you, are we? What follows is just random ideas. Look in the registry (see Raintheory's collection of tweaks) and see if any of the pointers are to things which simply do not exist (eg URI pointing to files). And look at the collection of Codecs you have installed. Reinstall Media Player 9? (Maybe later ones conflict with SS). And turn on the "show hidden" feature to show every device that has ever touched XP on your machine, and delete them all (the ones that are greyed out) from the Device Manager ("uninstall"). I haven't time to send you a link this minute, but search for "solution to slow upload SP" and a PINNED post by Avrin. Try turning off USB completely and seeing if SS will start up.... I guess we need to post a collection of steps to take when this happens, it's horrible, I know. Hang in there. If you get it to work, please come back and share with us what you did.

About 99% sure you won't find any new deck except Onkyo. However there are always plenty around. The trick is to find one with MDLP Type-S playback. AFAIK the models that support this (and also have optical out) are: MDS-JB980 MXD-D400 MDS-JE780 The only one of these that will be BNIB is the combo MXD-D400 - there is a guy with a stock of them on Yahoo Japan, for about 40,000 yen, which is even more than the Onkyo line, I think. Of course when you buy Onkyo you are buying HiMD in order to get MDLP, and it doesn't have optical out (there exists no HiMD unit that does!). MDS-JB940 turns up from time to time, too, but it doesn't have Type-S which is necessary if you really want to listen to LP2 recordings on your stereo system (forget LP4).

The last one sounds like the famous DRM keys. (mind you I think it might be a typo in your message, my research shows 4e2e not 4e22). Have a look here and see if it helps.

Ah, I know (I think) what's wrong with your setup. Maybe we can discuss offline. I recall this from numerous adventures hooking different things to my car. Send me a PM, we can publish the findings here when we are done.

I think the only reasonable place to do divides in a six-hour recording is on the portable. Of course, if I could afford an Onkyo Deck..... I have seen problems before with this "Untitled" - I think that's the clue. Multiple deletes of properly titled stuff have never ever failed on me. Bobt, you may well be right that it was trying to do something, but SS had rewritten the screen, and made the termination noise, and I had then pressed STOP and the unit said "OK to Eject Disk". I think the failure (too many identical files to delete in one go) followed by attempted ejection when both sides of the USB connection disagreed about what the state of the other side is, somehow triggers La-La Land. If I ever see this again (I successfully marked, titled, and uploaded another 6 hours without incident this morning on the same hardware) what should I do at the moment when I get that unexpected error, similar to what many have seen and posted about? I am thinking that at that moment maybe nothing was wrong - perhaps I should finagle to open the disk before ANYTHING gets written. Ideas? Thanks for the replies. Sounds like Sony must know about this one.

After 6 hours of recording, another hour of marking tracks, and then titling everything except the announcer, I managed to perpetrate the following: 1. I deleted about 5 or 6 "untitled" tracks (the announcer). So far so good. 2. I deleted another 5 or so ditto. Now SS complains that it couldn't do it. 3. I then retry leaving out the last one. Seems to work. 4. Now I try to play a track. Nothing happens. I eject the disk (press Stop) 5. Now it says (instead of no disc) some weird error message I dont remember 6. I put the disk in - says the disk is incompatible as not formatted by SS 7. Now I tried the disk in another HiMD player (the RH1)... same result. 8. Now I took the disk and put in original HiMD player not connected to USB - says "Cannot play or record". So I pressed the PLAY arrow, and bang, the system file is rewritten, no music on the disk at all. Result...all that work, and all that music.... gone, poufffffff!!! Boy, am I mad... and chastened. I know there is nothing to be done, but can anyone point to exactly what i did that messed it up? I strongly believe deleting more than one "untitled" had something to do with it, but I have no idea why some should work and some not.

Go for it, MDC is o.k.

The only way to transfer LP that wasn't made by a HiMD unit, or that was made using SonicStage, is to get an MDLP deck with digital out, and a sound card for your computer with digital in. Generally LP isn't a good format for transferring arround though; anything you really want to save should be kept in SP, or better on CD at the highest bitrate. Despite all the comments generally about Sony's paranoia, I believe that part of the reason for this is that the quality is not so good, and they(Sony) don't want a second-hand second-rate LP recording held up as example of the MD sound. Assuming you made the discs from linein or microphone, you should switch to recording in one of the atrac3+ modes if you want to upload from the NH900. However the LP that you already recorded NOT from SonicStage should be fine uploaded from the RH1, albeit you may not like the quality much.

Verrry interesting. I would imagine the part that failed (unless it's architectural in SS, which at this juncture I doubt, though am willing to be convinced) is the driver itself, NETMDUSB.SYS. There were certainly lots of revisions, leading me to think that Sony had trouble with this and kept changing it as different types of MD were hooked to the USB port. Certainly it seems that there's a good possibility that the latest driver (for RH1) was not *intended* to work with earlier units, and it certainly seems that earlier drivers are not forwards-compatible either. We've all seen odd things when SS does something inexplicable to do with NetMD's. I wonder if your solution might be more general.

What??? Is there some reason we don't have the file on our own site, or did someone hack the link?

Well done indeed! Closest I have come is some weird stuff done by Nero when burning DVD's, that failed on a 2CPU machine with 50% processing (ie one of the CPU's was in a loop). Since I had numerous other problems with the same project at the time, I discounted the possibility (though I did think of it). I would be interested in some details, since at some point I may need that too, even if it is for burning DVD's rather than SonicStage. However I bet we will all have nothing except multi-core in a few years and it's clear Sony isn't maintaining Sonic Stage. It *is* possible Sony've already fixed it and it's only a problem with BeatJam, however. I have no clue. Cheers