sfbp

But is there a Chocolate Frog in the Nook in Tesco? (Never having eaten a Quorn Toad myself)

It also happens to be the only utility I have ever caught any kind of trojan/virus from. So I have it but will only use to decode things that I cannot any other way, and it's only on a single machine. The clue to the suggestion in my previous post was the word "mono" in yours. Go on, try it...... Meanwhile I do agree with you that WinRar does compress ordinary (i.e. not dual-mono) wave files quite a bit better, somewhere between 30 and 40%. I hate the interface, which at least in my current version is poorly integrated with Windows (compared to WinZip). It also appears to be quite a bit slower - you don't get something for nothing. Maybe it's time to install the newest Winzip, I have it but am just very slow to change everyday tools. Cheers Stephen

I think I like one of his other articles better: this one about yorkshire pudding (Hands up, how many of you even know what it is?) Stamper was the name of one of the weaker-moraled personalities in "House of Cards" starring Ian Richardson, sort of appropriate don't you think?

Fair enough. But I have continued to sample "randomly selected" wave files from my (almost 100% classical) collection - and the average is only 10% reduction in size. The point about mono is that if both channels are exactly the same (ie dual stereo), it will compress more. I just observed this. Mono cannot be burned to CD at least for most current CD players to read (I still have a busted CD670 from Phillips that did) so you have to provide a stereo file to Nero. Sure enough, the files zip to about 50%. Granted I didn't actually NEED to have a WAV file that was 2x as big, but that is the default I think, for most tools, and indeed SonicStage itself. Which all tends to confirm my point. I just manufactured a mono wave file and it was exactly half the size of the dual stereo one. On (Winzip) compression, it went down by only about 9.8%. Whereas the stereo file was only a little bit bigger than the mono file uncompressed.

Ticked off? Wouldn't you expect a computer-generated sound to be more compressible? Avrin is just playing devil's advocate shoorley? :) Funnily enough I did just get a Winzip upgrade that promises to do better on jpegs, maybe it does better on sound too? added: I have a hunch this is something to do with the sound being in Mono. I just took some white noise (actually a background I used to subtract out from a particularly noisy recording) and it goes from 9.8M to 8.5. Ok, more like 10 or even 15% but nowhere near half. Real music seems to compress hardly at all)

Yep. Took wave files and they reduce to approx 40-50% of the original when coded to AAL. Of course this corresponds to 256 or 352 kbps - but I noticed there was little difference between those two at least. If you run LZH compression on a WAV file you get maybe 5% compression. Check? Maybe it's late in Moscow......

Sorry to disappoint you - it's all done with WAV files. I have SS set to always produce WAV on upload (saves a lotta accidents!) and when I need to play with them, there they are. The neatest thing I can do with CoolEdit (aside from FFT noise reduction which is a neat trick if you do it right), is to REMOVE the characteristic crackles from LP recordings. It always makes me laugh when I upload a recording from some cassette that I own, only to see the telltale signs of life as an LP that even the manufacturers didnt get rid of, that I suffering from audiophile OCD feel obliged to get rid of. (hint: when you delete 3 msec of sound, no ear will ever tell the difference, and most crackles are way smaller, well below 1msec)

Don't you do your SFE using a tool on the computer? It's as quick or quicker, and reversible too. Once I have got the recorded sound split into tracks I want, I upload with RH1, and then work on the wave files. Then I delete the oma from My Library, and reimport the .wav files. At this point they can be compressed for the purpose of saving space, to AAL. Some weird thing prevents wave files from being transcoded to AAL sometimes, but I haven't discovered what it is. The above sequence seems to work reliably. Alternatively, if I have major problems with the raw sound, I may upload it as one file, or via digi-opti-IO, so that whatever I do it's done consistently to the whole thing (eg removing a whine, or normalizing L/R balance). Then I split it up myself from CoolEdit (aka Audition) into individual wave files and import them into SS to do with as I wish. On another topic (that you touch on), I did record in MDCF my finding that creating groups on a HiMD disk after recording affects the ability to do editing operations such as creating track marks...... as long as you don't move things around, you can divide and combine to your heart's content.

It took me almost a year to discover (duh!) that I can "go fast" with the MZ-RH1 by pausing play and then using the jog lever. I would even go so far as to say that too much pushing on the jog lever in the "audible seeking" mode caused the same problems of glitches that many have complained of here. Stephen

Sorry - completely missed the ball on this one. It has been noted in the past that even the simplest transfers won't generate binary copies, just as Jupitreas says. Atrac Lossless is just a container, it's not actually useful except as a better way to store (and regenerate) wave files. And of course when something goes from 650MB to 300 (as you will find with AAL) then something got thrown away. We all know that zipping sound files doesn't reduce their size. The Lossless here means "just a better form of compression", as explained by Sony in the Help file, I thought adequately. "Lossless" is a relative word. My own take is that 292kbps(SP, original Atrac) and 256kbps (Atrac3+/HiMD) are as good as you are going to get. The major reason it's worth recording things in 1411 (CD) resolution is that if you get the dynamic range wrong in a live recording, there are still enough bits there that you can amplify it or normalize it, and it still sounds ok. Beware salesmen bandying words around......

Stick to SP, get devices with digi-out, and a sound card with Digi-In. Give up on USB. Once the sound you have is on CD, then burn it to wherever you want bearing in mind it's not going to get any better. One of the advantages of SP is there are no silly restrictions on editing. I have been quite unable to find out if HiMD in a deck removes those silly restrictions - I rather suspect not, as I found even my MXD-D400 deck refuses to edit certain tracks, unlike the JE640 which doesn't care.

I think it's very simple: the Sony stuff was done 1/2 an era earlier (on the bleeding edge) when there were no standards or design requirements such as this. The gapless probably arose by accident, and the glitch in the decoding/encoding is a bug, nothing more. The fact that they sold millions of these and that the technology is so solid (every SP disc is playable in every MD device, bar a few MZ-1's I believe) is why we are all here at MDCF. If I want to control exactly what I hear, I use SP (good AtoD on the decks) and then edit the WAV files, finally burning them to CD. Then and only then do I consider portable audio. We're still way ahead of the I**d crowd in sound quality, IMO.

I seem to recall that even the Redbook spec for CD's is kinda iffy. Always amazed me how the drivers could decode all that info and reconstitute it by means of CRC, lead in and the like, especially when there's only one chance to write it. I well remember writing the low level drivers, one byte at a time, for floppy disks, and how you had to allow for the fact that there is no guaranteed moment during the spin when data starts arriving - it is necessary to "sync" with the bytes until you see a pattern. Same with serial and Ethernet communication. Underneath the nice veneer of ordered frames and guaranteed delivery there is a mess. Sound and video data is the same - ultimately analog sound discretised into bits. The major difference is that we are accustomed to a lot of compression techniques to get manageable data sizes. Unlike (say) LZH compression (zipfiles), we generally don't expect perfect reproduction of what was compressed. For example I was collecting up some old episodes of a show I like, scattered over multiple DVD's, and one of them had awful errors on it. The solution, make a digital copy using the computer, and ignore the errors. Even though the copy I made was not correct (the source simply had irrecoverable bad data in it in about 20 places), once it had a good checksum, it played back in the DVD player, and there was little or no hint to the eye and ear that something was wrong. Listener/watcher doesn't really care. Ultimately that is the test - is the quality of what we hear/see good enough to listen/watch? BTW, there's a well documented thing with SS rearranging data and it involves 0.5 second at the end and beginning of tracks - a "bug", and I am sure you have read the threads (but for others reading this, I mention it - look for "gapless"). There's a reason for the 2 seconds usually added between sound tracks during CD creation. It's similar to the space between bands on an LP - the idea is just what I was talking about at the beginning, time for the reading of data to synch up. We are incredibly lucky to have all this technology handed to us by the engineers whoi worked so hard. I don't grumble much about the issues you raise - if there were perfect sound, as with video, it could be measured compared, fingerprinted, and locked up. You wouldn't want that?

I think you're glossing over the fact that I can take a PCM file and convert it to Atrac3+, and take an Atrac3+ file and convert to PCM. Anyway there's no DMCA here or in Britain.

Well, Marc (Hi-MD Renderer guy) does it somehow. I just tested it, he can code and decode Atrac3+.

So, Avrin, how do we swap an OMA header for a .WAV header? I just ran HiMDRenderer but it "only" produces ordinary PCM 1411Khz files. The goal here (for me anyway) is to enable me to edit Atrac3+ files without having to resort to spewing out (ie they are very large) the standard Windows 1411 wave files. Is there a way to do that?

Thanks for the clarification Avrin (blush, I should know better). In 99.999999999999.....% (runs out of dots) the .WAV format contains only 1411 khz PCM, however. We're confusing OP somewhat. OK I found the atrac3 codec and installed it. Does it work with Audition's predecessor, CoolEdit, which is what I have? Is there a codec for Atrac3+? This is very interesting. I fired up CoolEdit, and sure enough it tried to load in some .OMA files. But what do I have to do to actually recognise them? (I picked some "Optimized files" so they would be the LP2 that gets send to NetMD). (update) Ok, I figured it out. Took a song in .WAV 1411khz and compressed it to 132kbps Atrac3 - file went from 40MB to 4 MB, and reloads into CoolEdit just perfectly. Of course, as everyone knows this is a pointless exercise as we don't want to store things archivally in LP2 because it's lossy. So what about Atrac3+?

Just got back from the store (Sony Style). 1. The replacement (they had exactly 1 and then no more) CMTHPR99XM plays my Atrac CD 2. No Digi-Out, even though it is in the online specifications - no mention in instruction manual or sign of the connector on back This is the ONLY one they had that plays Atrac3 or Atrac3+ of any kind.

Groan. I just tried making an Atrac CD. I figured they might let me try it in the device. Can't even get one track onto the CD. Can it really be that I am not allowed to put anything on that CD except PROTECTED Atrac3+? (i have all unprotected which I tried, as well as .wav). In addition (and part of the reason I was going to go in and look at it) the store swears up and down there is no digi-out. Help! (yeah it seems for sure that I have to reprotect all the files I want to burn to Atrac CD. Yuch - cannot even play them from SS to make sure they are burned on the CD correctly). Off to store to have a look at this beast.

Does this unit not look like it supports Atrac3+ and therefore all the HiMD formats? Makes me think that one could buy this and have a super backup for all MD's. The unit has OPTICAL OUT (hooray!) so presumably one could get all the sound files back if worst came to worst and one didnt have a single HiMD unit to play them on. And a lot cheaper than Onkyo. I would laugh like the proverbial drain if Sony followed this up with the same thing with a DVD drive that would play all archived Atrac3+ files. Maybe someone is going to tell me that this item doesn't exist, or is crippled (again) by copy protection, or..... Sigh, it is discontinued. SonyStyle are looking for me to see if there is a replacement with Digiout and Atrac3+ playback. However there is a CMTHPR99XM - here are the specs (couldnt find it online). What does anyone think? Comments really welcomed.

These prices make no sense, IMHO. Don't buy these at long distance - make sure you have a working unit in your hand before you part with cash. If you know the seller personally, snap them BOTH up - you can resell whichever you decide you don't need.

Wow, I didn't think you would take my little comment about RH1 as "negativity". The same observation has been made over and over again - the jog lever wears out and generates glitches, after about a year. My error was to even consider this as a player - it is so valuable as a recorder and uploader that I almost wore it out before realising I was about to fall down the same hole as others.

1. try something similar with a disk you don't care about. If that works the problem is not with the unit. I mean writing not just reading. The read function might be fine until the NEXT disk you try to alter. 2. try removing the track mark with another unit. If you don't have one, it's time to get one anyway. Sorry 'bout that. My guess is that machine ran out of power at the critical moment. Since it's not HiMD there's a very good chance you can recover all the music/recorded info using TOC cloning. Look at user Raintheory's sig information for stuff about TOC cloning. Good luck!

wav IS exactly Windows PCM HiMD uses a. PCM/wav or b. Atrac3+ c. Atrac3 (NetMD) or d. Atrac (SP) d. is strange because it seems to give almost perfect aural reproduction despite being many years older and less "sophisticated" than the newer codecs. Of course any ordering by quality/size (more data, bigger should mean less compression and therefore better quality) depends on which data rate you employ for b and c. since they are both variable (b. from 352kbps down to 48, c. from 132 down to 66). Although some folks insist on PCM, Atract3+ at 256K and Atrac SP at 292K are both considered by most to be "good enough" for listening to. In my experience the only thing I need PCM for is live microphone recordings with unknown dynamic range. This allows me to amplify (magnify) the quiet bits, throwing away the loud bits completely (eg applause) without losing enough volume range to make the music sound thin and poor in quality. After such processing I end up with something about the same as the best Atrac3+ and/or original Atrac. Atrac3 (no +) is not recommended for valuable recordings, it throws away too much stuff; but its great for portable audio.

Typically you don't notice any inbuilt compression flaws at all on portables. I would think that optical in to the 930 would be the best way to record off of a DVD or CD (there doesn't exist a way to rip CD's in SP except via one of their combo decks, and who knows what is going on there anyway?). You could certainly compare download with SS to the NF510 against an SP recording made either optically or digitally. The main advantage of using digital is avoiding hum loops. Amusingly all the radio sources I have tried to record lately already had hum or something like it, in the signal. This is the same reason it's better to rip a CD to computer than use analog line in.