sfbp

I have just one question: WHY? Is there some reason that wearing out a single minidisc of better quality is somehow safer than wearing out a few hundred (like many of us addicts here) of perfectly acceptable quality? Digital media, Sony states that they should be able to read and rewritten a million times or so.

Yeah, probably a blown LED (or its circuitry). Not much you can do about that without risking compromising the NH1 - and for what? I think as long as you know it's charging by other means, let sleeping dogs lie

Is it because it's not charging? You should be able to see on the RM-MC40ELK....

Language packs don't do it, IIRC. Congrats to MS if they managed to fix that problem. It used to be so frustrating looking at Japanese pdfs for example.

Yep, a MZ-N707 will not play HiMD disks. It's most compressed codec is MDLP. That is why you see the message you do. Sorry. You need to fix the NH600 or buy a new (well, replacement) HiMD player or player-recorder.

In one word, YES!

The major difference between ATRAC and MP3 is, if I recall the explanation correctly. one is in the time domain and one in the frequency domain. As well, later versions (ATRAC3/+) take special care with encoding certain recurring frequencies (ie steady notes) in the output by subtracting them out and encoding separately, thereby leaving more bits for the rest of the sound to be encoded (this means for example that pipe organs sound surprisingly good at low bit rates). ATRAC uses fixed frames covering a certain amount of time (i don't recall). All this stuff can be found on minidisc.org. Stephen

Someone is selling LIP-12s on EBay http://www.ebay.com/itm/MD-Players-Battery-for-sony-MZ-B3-LIP-12H-MZ-E3-MZ-R2-LIP-12-/400902162329?hash=item5d57a18799:g:hXIAAMXQVT9S15WS

I'm still not sure about parallels as I have no way of testing it. However I did confirm that if you install Sonic Stage on 64-bit windows, and plug in a Hi-MD recorder whose DISC MODE is set to MD (ie NetMD) then what appears to happen is the USB subsystem gets messed up and won't transfer Hi-MD stuff, probably because the 32-bit NetMD driver is being invoked. So, FWIW, UPDATE the NetMD driver (look in Device Manager and you will see it!) to NETMD760.* (see the instructions everywhere for NetMD under 64-bit Windows in our downloads section) to be the 64-bit driver, and magically the Hi-MD transfers will work too. This is preferable to setting the DISC MODE, in a way, because if you put a non-HiMD disk into the unit, it can still appear to the computer as a NetMD disk and will load the WRONG driver. And one more tip for all you with battery problems, don't even think of trying to do transfers without a battery in the unit. The presence of the battery (preferably with a little charge in it) stabilises the power supply and makes it immune to the power fluctuations which occur mid-transfer from unexpected seeks and the like. Update: it looks like you have to go in and search for windows\inf\oem*.inf where the file contains the phrase NetMD and delete them. I think there are routinely 5 after a standard Sonic Stage install.

Not all formats are played by VLC/ffmpeg (the same code went into both). However the ones most generally protected (encrypted) ARE playable. Exceptions: PCM 1411 kbps. It's too bad they couldn't figure this one out, but I am pretty certain encrypted PCM files cannot be played. Atrac Advanced Lossless - it's not a protected format but you will need Sonic Stage DLL's to play it. And I'm not entirely sure about LP3 (105kbps, but most people never discovered that format!) But the most common formats (LP2,LP4,Hi-LP,Hi-SP, and probably other Hi-formats such as 352kbps) should be fine. ONE VERY IMPORTANT NOTE: do not assume that 64kbps ATRAC needs 64kbps MP3. You'll get garbage. My recommendation is to convert all forms of ATRAC less than 256kbps to MP3 256K, and Hi-SP (256kbps ATRAC) to something higher than that. ATRAC is a very good encoding scheme, much better than MP3 at low bitrates. Above 256kbps it doesn't make so much difference.

Yup works great. I did it slightly different, but same principle, hook up BC700 to terminals of defunct prismatic charger.

No special driver is required for Hi-MD. Hence you can see the standard Microsoft drivers that treat it as a standard disk. Check the dates, manufacturer and version numbers of those files if you don't believe me. Did you change DISC MODE? Or did you look to see what the display says? You need to make sure it says Hi-SP inside the Menu setting DISC MODE. If it says "Hi-SP" (and "Hi-MD" in a different place, I just checked) on the display during playback that proves nothing. The NetMD driver should have been installed during SS installation. The fact that it is not (even presuming that parallels gives you a 32-bit environment) means you cannot access any of the NetMD verbs during operation. Hence the crash. The problem is that Parallels takes the USB connection down at the slightest provocation (after all it does have charge of the native USB port). It IS possible there's a way to make the USB connection "dedicated" (I have no idea what that would be in Apple lingo). This might solve your problem. I do NOT expect parallels to support Minidisc (esp. legacy formats MDLP and SP) natively. The same problem exists with Windows XP virtual box running under Windows 64-bit. However we have a 64-bit NetMD driver which allows SS to talk directly to 64-bit windows. I don't think that would work with parallels (which I am sure will be 64-bits) but you can always attempt to figure it out. I cannot - I don't have a Mac to work with. Sorry.

Set the DISC MODE on the unit to Hi-MD. Now it won't try to change to MD (NetMD) every time you insert or eject a disk. Parallels will definitely have trouble with that. It's a USB problem. Listen to the sound made when a USB connection goes up or down. You have to use the menu on the device itself. There is nowhere else you can change this parameter. However anything you were doing that depended on a default of NetMD (MD) will no longer work. And... you need to make sure the NetMD driver is installed. Since that is very likely impossible in Parallels, the system will crash every time it tries to switch to MD mode, for whatever reason.

Wonder if you'd like to upload a zip of your disk for the CMT-SE9? You can find the one for the CMT-M333NT here and from bitter experience it's slightly different I would guess. Also if have both we may be able to figure out the difference between the 2, I bet it's only one or two files. You'd be doing users a service because I am sure Sony no longer supports any of this (to them) junk. PM me for details and we'll figure a way to it (it's a bit big for a "normal" upload). Note that it's not necessary to include the entire disk, my upload was "only" 67MB.

Bad news, people. Lithium batteries can no longer be shipped from Japan by UPS under new regulations. Not sure what that means for postal delivery, but I have a hunch that's already been kiboshed. Does anybody know?

CDDB is for CD's. Period.

You cannot get Mcrew to talk to the PC's disk when MCrew runs in the 32 bit virtual xp box on 64 bit windows!

I well remember the "ultra-sophisticated" CD players featuring 20-bit oversampling. And I would be stunned if all CD's really cut off at 15 Khz. The theoretical limit is half the sampling frequency ie 22.05 Khz.

The point is (I think) that CD's are really 20-bit (or so recording) dithered down to 16 bits. You may or may not get the exact bits by ripping a CD. All your experiment proves is that you get the same 16 bits every time you do it. There are different algorithms and ways of getting the data off the CD which corresponds to different "ripping quality". However when you rip to ATRAC, I believe you get something closer to the intended 20 bits. Otherwise it wouldn't make a difference how fast you rip things (note there are different ripping qualities built into Sonic Stage). Your 15500 number indicates something that's simply not true - there is NO 15khz cutoff on real CD's. No, it's not snake oil or perpetual motion.

Good point. In fact making a 16-bit file from FLAC is a downgrade (quite a considerable one) from the original CD. What you should do with FLAC files is to convert them direct to the ATRAC file of your choice using Sound Forge 10. SF9 does not understand FLAC, by the way.

Straight cuts with a cheesecutting wire or ordinary knife. Why 4?

No holes.

I never used the tables. But I did make it emulate several quite complex remotes, in at least one case making it simpler to operate the device than with the original remote that i still had. I can see the MDS-W1 might be quite a headache!

The VL600 is completely programmable. Really. Best of all, it learns.