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Thanks to you for your tip. This is just to say that SonicStage is alive and well on Windows 7 Beta 32-bit edition. I may try 64-bit later, but I take your word for it. Some oddities: a. I had to manually install the NetMD drivers from pa_audio.zip (from this site I believe) in order to upload NetMD with my RH1. b. When I had done this, the installation wouldn't actually finish until I unplugged the USB connector from the RH1. After that it worked perfectly. So there may be some lingering problems although those could be not to do with W7 but the dual-core machine I am running it on. c. The splash screen for SonicStage (normally blue) was grey. This has me puzzled, since all other applications seem to have the right colours and settings for the onboard video adapter this machine has. If you have an explanation for c. I would be interested - meantime I expect I will eventually track down what's not set right in Windows 7. Stephen

Yup. SP is as close to CD quality as you will ever see. LP2 only sounds decent if a. you have something that transcodes well AND b. the playback is Type-S. For example I can satisfy a. (by experiment) but until I play back on my MXD-D400 which has analogue out into my stereo system the LP2 sound is (relatively) bad (I had my JE640 sitting with the stereo for a very short while until I discovered this). Some tracks don't seem to satisfy a., either. Especially anything which started out life as MP3 (probably?!?) regardless of bit rate. The two encodings seem to "argue" with each other. Sony was accused of deliberately making MP3 sound bad when they first offered it in MD.. I actually think they had to work really hard to get around this one somehow. And that only applies to the "native MP3 playback" on certain HiMD units. I seem to have noticed some strange encoding problems with relatively quiet music such as chamber music, normalised to a room-filling volume. Long held notes seem to be an especial problem. Bluecrab and I have exchanged disks and we may(!?) be able to tell you what is up in this regard. But there's no question, SP is better. And the SP you get from SonicStage doesn't cut it, I expect you will find. There's no codec for SP on your computer, probably something to do with their agreements with Dolby (my guess is Sony obtained some license for something on hardware only, excluding PC's). But you shouldn't be surprised that SP is better. More bits = more definition = clearer sound? Stephen

That's another vote in favour of getting a sound card with opti in and opti out - (I think) most of them have it unblocked, or the ability to turn it off. The Terratec Aureon 5.1 seems to be fine; there is a more expensive 7.1 too. But probably NOT the one that plugs into USB. There you may run into problems if you are simultaneously running SS over USB to the RH1. In fact this may be the problem with DACMagic, unless you have an optical card. The other way to look at this USB issue is that: a. Sony knows that its HiMD support simply won't work on a USB hub (ie HiMD and another device plugged into the same USB controller) b. the transfer of sound data takes up most of the CPU, and there are even some situations where it doesn't work with a super fast processor - ie it is timing dependent, too fast or too slow and you get burnt potatoes instead of music So having 2 USB devices, one HiMD and one some sort of output of sound via USB, is not likely to work, for the same underlying reasons as a. and b.

I think all that is needed is a sound card with optical out. Cost 10-20 pounds. No reliance on D->A in portable MD. There is no way that you can use the USB transmissions designed for Sonic Stage by pushing them instead to DACMagic. The only thing known to drive the USB is Sonic Stage and the transmissions are actually encrypted (**** I think, lol - every time I make one of these assertions, Avrin turns out to know better - pace Avrin *****). However if you hook up your RH1 (or any HiMD device) to USB and play something back from SS, it will show up in the audio stream which can be sent OUT (within reason and any limitations placed by DRM or Microsoft) wherever you like. I am currently listening to (and recording on to my MD deck via optical out) a track from a HiMD using the RH1, just to test this assertion. Note that this absolutely doesn't apply to uploadable NetMD or SP tracks, even on the RH1, as they are played back "traditionally" ie on the MD side only. For that you can use a legacy deck.. but I am sure you know that.

I wuz thinking more like virtual clippers

You might like the N910. I don't own the N10 or the R900 but it is by the accounts I looked at essentially an N10 with a few improvements. Who knows, maybe someone will say they are un-improvements... but I like it.

Is that her name? I thought it was Victoria.........

'tis normal - post to/from UK about 3 days, to/from North Vancouver about 4 days

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.