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GUESS WHAT!? I think someone paid the subscription or something - I just found GraceNote to be functional again with Sonic Stage. Could someone else please confirm this? I had to work hard to find a CD that hadn't been imported into Sonic Stage and whose tracks were already in my database. Stephen

Everything you need is here on this site, and has been working fine for at least 5 years. Not everyone thinks that SonicStage is a bad piece of software. Sure, it has restrictions, some of them silly, but compared to the offerings from Apple and others it is positively flexible if you know how (and that's one of the things we have here, a source of expertise). You need the NetMD 64bit driver (best to install it first, if I recall, then there's less need to uninstall old versions that don't work and which come in the SS package). Then install SonicStage and you're good to go. Life's not perfect; I am about to start checking out the new gizmo, which is quite a revolution in itself - but if you want something that's stable, you may want to start with Sonic Stage. There are plenty of people here with over 100GB of ATRAC, most of it 10x compressed or even more relative to WAV - and it's been a while since anyone complained they lost all their music. Welcome to the board!

The level setting for automatic track division turns out to be quite annoying. Either you get no division at all , or a gazillion little tracks which then end up having to be rejoined. The adjustment is quite fussy and once you have a setting that works, it's best to leave it. On my MDS-PC3 for example, I have LS set to -46dB for optical input. However if you adjust the input gain, it will be necessary to tweak the LS by the same amount as you changed the gain.

Maybe I'm muddling my terms - maybe it's the stray light adjustment. All I recall is that some disks, when borderline, seemed to have a problem with playback. By "some disks" I mean that different makes and models OF DISKS behaved differently. The ones that have given me problems are some types (but not all) with transparent cases - whereas the ones with opaque cases passed the test in the situation where the transparent ones failed. I believe the adjustment I'm talking about is only a thing on portables.

It's quite unlikely that the difference between 74 and 80 is your problem. More probable is that they have different reflectivities. There's supposed to be circuitry which (mainly at record time) fixes that problem. I know that some disks (of one type) recorded on a portable absolutely refused to play on a deck, when I started out. After that I was more careful with recording. It depends how they were made, recording takes 10x as much power as reading, and it could be you were trying to run on rechargeable batteries. It should work but on older machines there is adjustment of the power circuits (on portables) to be done. What model numbers are we talking that recorded? I am guessing that if you can record on the deck you will be able to play back on everything (portables and deck). BTW the other possibility is that all your 80 minute disks were recorded at MDLP - this thread doesn't say how the failure occurs. Do you get playback but no sound, or is there a C13 or C14 error?

Generally speaking, the non-MD ATRAC devices seem to prefer Hi-MD, if I recall. I'm very excited about the breakthroughs reported here and can't wait to try 'em. Unfortunately real life has been getting in the way a bit lately, hence my failure to chime in with everyone else and say "Well done". I am curious to read about the embedded technology - assuming it is based on the pioneering work done by the #linux-minidisc group and particularly Michael Karcher. One of the things I never persuaded him to work on was the AAL (Atrac Advanced Lossless) - he ran out of time as his career plans required to step away from MD endeavours. The codecs really cannot be that different as it appears that Sound Forge handles them seamlessly. From the description they must work in the same way.

sorry but we really don't have any fund of knowledge on Vaio our focus here tends to be sound in general and minidisc in particular thanks for sharing - maybe some kind soul who happens along may know, but i would not hold my breath

I thought there were portables (MZ-R700) which were MDLP but not type-R? see here: http://minidisc.org/sony_mzr97500_comparison.html

I took a look at that web page, you can get a lot of kit for 126 Euros these days

With respect, we know so many simple ways to get around SCMS, this project is kinda moot. 1. Buy a pro model (for around $200?) such as the MDS-E10 2. Get a device like the Behringer Ultramatch Pro 3. Buy a $20 sound card for a PC - the majority of them don't care about SCMS and allow you to disable it, period. The major problem people have with MD these days is the folks who unwisely used NetMD to make LP2 disks (excellent quality, 2-3 CD's per MD) but now have "lost" the original CD (or perhaps never had it except briefly) and want to get the data off the MD. There is almost nothing to fix this problem except playing back at x1. Granted, you will still need to get over the SCMS problem then. But there's no SCMS in the actual ATRAC file, I think. In addition there are so many other pesky restrictions designed to protect Sony a. as a content producer b. against lawsuits like the one over the Betamax that almost finished them off 40 years ago, and we know all of them, that the SCMS is probably the least of them. 20 years ago it may have presented as the most significant stumbling block to copying music. Today, it ain't. Good luck in your quest. Or stick around here to see the real life solution to what I can only guess is the the real life problem. Cheers

Don't forget that any unit minus its OWH is a recipe for disaster. The first attempt to write a track mark, for example, on a recorded MO disk (anything which writes the TOC), or any other *writing* activity will blank the disk (forever, except one can fake a new TOC on another machine of course and thereby recover the audio data). What happens is the laser is switched to 10x power to do the write but not modulated by the OWH. So the disk is erased at that spot, rendering the catalog empty. Very useful for erasing NetMD disks, though, with their unerasable TrProt track flags. So if your OWH is not connected it will be just like the above. I have a feeling you know this; but for the benefit of someone in a year or three reading this...... Stephen

I don't think that the conversion I mention *significantly* degrades the quality. There are many here who will attest that it's really quite hard to demonstrate loss on ATRAC. Certainly not after 1 conversion. Compare that to the approximations made by *analog* microphones, and on the sonic level it matters less than having a common format for all one's "stuff" that sounds decent. Far more telling than any of the things you mention are sound cards which insist on converting everything to 48,000 sampling rate before playback. I'm very glad that you can play ATRAC1 on your PC. However it cannot be edited. ATRAC3+ can, using Sound Forge, AFAIK the only editor which works. They didn't finish that project (QHiMDTransfer), and it is mostly not useful because of the many deficiencies in the "finished" article. Therefore, I don't use it.

Your left-brain assertions are well-heeded. And I unfortunately disagree with them. However, data on a CD frequently doesn't sound as good as the same thing ripped to ATRAC. Go figure.

Atrac3+ is actually a much better codec. The fact that "original SP" seems to give a cleaner sound than an "original CD" is due to some clever tweaks in the design of ATRAC, which actually alters the supposedly 16 bit data off the disk by playing with oversampling just like good CD players do. A combination of upsampling and oversampling, followed by re-coding into ATRAC's logarithmic format. There's little difference (minor transformation) between ATRAC and ATRAC3+ in terms of that - both are 24-bit formats.

That may be, but in practice it doesn't seem to work that well. How else do you explain Sony providing in SS different qualities of ripping?

You're going to end up converting them no matter what, as there is no codec that plays ATRAC1. You may as well allow the software/firmware to give you Atrac3+. If you don't you're likely to end up with something worse. ATRAC is inherently a 24-bit format and I don't think QHiMDTransfer solves that problem when converting to 16-bit wave files (which you can also do with Sonic Stage). They also never solved the problem of tracks that didn't start on a cluster boundary, which may be what you're seeing with the conversion.

Go back to Windows 7 (or whatever), change the setting. Install Windows 10 as a dual boot. Sorry we really don't know much about Vaios.

Fair enough. I checked my usual source for service manuals that we don't have (elektrotanya.com) and there's no sign of it. We look forward to your user review Welcome to our little world!

Sorry, no. This is not an official Sony site, and we don't know very much about the specifics of Vaio computers. You have to get into the ROM BIOS configuration, which you can do with a key sequence. If you get to the "missing operating system" message, hit Ctrl-Alt-Del and try again. The key in decreasing order of likelihood is either <DEL> or <F2> or <F9>. Good luck!

Are you sure? Sounds like it hasn't arrived yet.....

You did well - the last time that happened to me the post broke off (it was my laptop, not a minidisc recorder).

It's the first and most popular download on this site. You will have to turn off signature enforcement for long enough to install it. This is not obvious and involves restarting windows 10

The male socket that goes into the MD unit is known as Mini B, in USB-speak. Micro-B is something else, namely what a lot of phones use.

Keep them in the dark. The ones in the packet are likely to degrade just as fast as the one in your machine, so having hundreds isn't particularly a measure of survivability.

Nah, it will stop working the moment you put the cover on and put it back on the HiFi Stack (just kidding).