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sfbp

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Everything posted by sfbp

  1. sfbp
    Right, but I think there are lots of bargains that do not last many minutes. The prices you refer to are people selling for more than the value. TBH, the second generation HiMD units (RH10,RH910, etc.) are the least reliable of the portables, sadly.
  2. sfbp
    NetMD means (really) that the disk was MADE by NetMD. Are you sure? If what you have is a "legacy" disk then there are two questions: 1. Did the legacy disk get formatted to HiMD specs (can you see the .HMA file like on the one you mentioned)? 2. Was the transfer to the disk via USB, if not HiMD? If #1 is yes, you should be able to work with the disk same way you did with the 1GB disks. If you cannot, it means that you are kindof screwed. However, the good news is that HiMDXfer may be able to help. If the answer to #1 is NO, then you need an MZ-RH1, no ands ifs or buts (except for the x1 transfer - you can do it digitally, just need a deck with optical out). Sorry. How many disks? If the answer to #2 is YES, then even MZ-RH1 won't help you. But probably you have original recordings and it's not an issue. Anyway it sounds like things are starting to move.
  3. sfbp
    TBH, I don't think you will get that price (except maybe on EBay). $100 seems nearer the mark. Kind regards
  4. sfbp
    If you're running Windows 7 or later, I strongly suggest turning off Windows Update. This should fix the system from going bad. The only problem with this is that Microsoft, in their fervour to force everyone to use W10 has messed up the Windows Update site (there IS a solution, but first, verify that this is your problem). The standard configuration includes tasks that wake up in the middle of the night and do heavy stuff like defrag, sending all your information to MSFT, and of course update. ("All your bases are belong to us" - Apple's method is simply to make the hardware obsolete much faster as I found out when my son approached me for $2000 to buy a new laptop). If you're on XP, don't be particularly afraid of SP2. Until SP2 many of most drivers for USB didn't work well. This included Sony in some cases. MIcrosoft doesn't care about XP activation much since they started giving away free copies as "virtual XP" in their Windows 7 installations. This nonsense with verifying the DB during installation is Sony trying very hard to fix your non-existent database. You need to be aware that there's a bunch of stuff under C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Sony Shared ALL of which can be deleted. Yes ALL of it. This should prevent the install from trying to rebuild a non-existent database. You could try ignoring the install error. If you do, often installing again right over the top (don't even bother to delete), may solve the problem.
  5. sfbp
    You did everything right (don't need the 64-bit NetMD drivers), but you omitted to take account of the (unknown to you) fact that Sony needs the disk to be UNwrite-protected before it will pull stuff off them. I know, that's one place they violated the rules (there are, as you imply, others). However the vast majority of users spent man-years putting copies of copyrighted music ON to minidisc, and Sony not unreasonably felt that they couldn't encourage them to recover music from disks where the owner did not have the original CD. Sigh. (there was also the small matter of the world's first trillion dollar lawsuit against them over the original VCR, but we'll postpone that discussion until you've calmed down and got your data). Actually copying music back from the MD was not allowed originally - instead they had to update the transfer count on the PC which is no different than Amazon or Itunes IMO. So things actually improved from the "legacy MD" recordings, which recordings the BBC used happily as their entire work product for about 15 years. To be fair, there's a lot better chance that an MD will be readable in 2025 than the disk from an Atari, Amiga or Commodore 64 (Apple 2 - we won't even go there). Exercise trust (and caution) and open the disks to writing, and you'll have no further problems. Stephen
  6. sfbp
    You have to have Sonic Stage actually download something to the MD. The flag is on a track's TOC entry, not on the disk.
  7. sfbp
    More to the point the E12 supports MDLP (as do some other units) whereas the SP decks do not. Not clear if cloning MDLP TOCs is possible with SP decks. I have a feeling that the MDLP decks respect the TrProtect flag. I'm not sure if the E series are the exception to this. You can tell us.
  8. sfbp
    Check for things like Norton Internet Security, Zone Alarm, hijacked DNS (ie are your own dns servers pointing where they should be or has some malware pointed them elsewhere?) Oh yes, there are couple of "background" programs (from Sony) that you may have never needed and some security sweep analyzer disabled them. SS<something>.exe
  9. sfbp
    There's another issue here, No browser should be writing gigabytes of data to your computer. This should only come about because of the latest monster websites which each use three hundred (well, I exaggerate) JavaScript packages from anything up to about 30 sites. I strongly suspect that this problem (and the main reason I abandoned Chrome a couple of years back) is the real driver of the hard disk wearing out. Of course FF has to keep taking snapshots of it if the scripts are running and changing things all the time. The 15-minute refresh on news is one example. What you and others may prefer to consider (presumably someone out there has tools to measure this - I've got no motivation and cannot be bothered, sorry) is NoScript which allows the user of Firefox to be selective about which sites' JavaScript packages are allowed to run on one's machine. Whitelisting is sort of interactive, one can generally figure out which sites to add. This is the ONLY way I know to allow access to all kinds of websites without being "spied on" and generally having websites take over your computer. Many websites are just a vehicle to load nasty JS onto your machine. Big companies hate NoScript, because they rely on JS to gather information for them. Ed Snowden has been telling people ever since he first rose to prominence, about this tool. Highly recommended. I'm not posting links here, as it may simply draw bots from who-knows-which-cyber-army. But it's easy enough to find in the list of FF add-ons. The PC version (but not the Android version, sadly) allows you to load some or even ALL scripts from a given web page temporarily - you can revoke all temporary permissions very easily. That's what I do when I want to checkin for an airline ticket, for example. You'd be horrified just how many scripts get loaded. Malware in scripts is the new source of trouble, and the reason why "attack websites" can catch their victims.
  10. sfbp
    Nice tip. I bet it's not that hard-disk friendly either Even worse is the way that Google News defaults to autorefresh every 15 minutes. Therein lies a long story for me to tell one of these days.
  11. sfbp
    The E series definitely don't set the nocopy bit, from everything I've ever read. But this is not about SCMS, I think. NetMD is not secured by that mechanism.
  12. sfbp
    Did you actually STOP the windows 8.1 firewall service?
  13. sfbp
    Someone's sold you a bill of goods. There is NO DRM on the data (in the sense we normally mean it, namely actual encryption), just an extra field on the TOC. The reason for this is simple, your disk is still playable on devices made before they invented NetMD (and TrProtect). If you can find a deck (or portable) where, instead of leaving it alone, the TrProtect bit in each entry is reset, then your idea should work. However, the scheme would founder if there were any rewritings of the FAT map of the drive - ie. both versions should be made with a virgin disk. I'm guessing the MDS-E10 might just do this, as it is a pro deck which in theory allows copying anything. As always, YMMV. Stephen
  14. sfbp
    Were you on line? If you had some super paranoid settings on firewall you might have been blocked as i don't know what ports if any are used. Finally as I've said a few times, historically the Sony server that does the authentication is sometimes down.
  15. sfbp
    Unfortunately when you make a CD-R the computer ends up with much of the data scattered across the hard disk. Unless you happen to have one of the rare standalone CD recorders which are IMHO a real pain to use.
  16. sfbp
    That's easy. Don't run on a Mac. Sorry.
  17. sfbp
    Corona - Turn off Windows Update and try again. I'm thinking something is happening at 3am (or whenever Update runs automatically). But it may be simpler than that. You don't give us enough details: a. What version of Windows 7 (pro or home)? b. Are you logged in as Administrator, with UAC and/or DEP turned off? c. What exactly were you doing when it crashed? d. What error message did you get? Anyway, strong recommendation NOT to use the default location for user data, as the path may become too long if the title of albums is long eg C:\Users\My very long user name\my documents\<blah..... blah>\SonicStage\Packages\imported sound|<very long album name indeed>\<even longer track name>.OMA So suggest you create a folder called C:\Sonicstage\imported sound\, and point the storage for uploads from the HiMD at this location. Make sure that your users (that you run SS under) has Full Control Access to it. If you're running Home Premium, you may still have a problem, and you MUST run from a "Power User" or member of Administrators.
  18. sfbp
    The world wants to know - which was the critical step?
  19. sfbp
    Really? Then everything I said is true EXCEPT you should not have to do anything other than run the install. However: a. if you have an RH1 and also some other units, install the 32-bit driver from our downloads section (after following the directions I referred to). Otherwise you will have horrendous slowdowns and likely wear out your RH1, as per the previous thread recently b. make sure you get rid of the Connect Store URL (which will happen if you ran the Ultimate install from our downloads section). There are TWO Ultimates here - Microsoft's (edition of Windows) and Sonic Stage (ours). Still do all the rest I said, though. I'm surprised anyone is running 32-bit Windows, as I haven't seen an application that couldn't run correctly with some combination of settings in 64-bit Windows. This includes Sonic Stage. If you tried to install SimpleBurner, that might get you into a whole heap of trouble because the incompatibility there may well be to do with the version of Windows, not the 32- or 64-ness of that version.
  20. sfbp
    It's not unusual for the install to fail partway through. You should simply retry right over the top of what was there already. I strongly recommend disconnecting any NetMD devices while the install is going on. I also recommend you follow the steps outlined here to get rid of the 32-bit NetMD drivers. You also need to install the 64-bit driver at some point, but that can wait for the moment, as long as you don't try to connect a NetMD unit (I'm assuming that you like most people are running 64-bit Windows 7). Also it's highly likely you've messed up the Jet (Microsoft Access) database somehow. Did you copy some stuff from another machine onto the new one? In which case it will be shot to heck unless you did it the proper way (with Sonic Stage Backup followed by Sonic Stage Restore on the new machine). Probably you need to clean off everything in C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Sony Shared, especially the AVlib folder. If you have more than THREE folders in Sony Shared, stop for a moment and figure out what other Sony software is installed, and perhaps uninstall it for now. If not, go ahead and delete the lot. Now you need to get rid of all of the data in C:\Users\All Users\Sony Corporation\SonicStage. Then reboot. Finally, turn OFF automatic updates, and run the install as a user with administrator privileges. No idea what happens if you're on Windows Home Premium.
  21. sfbp
    You could save a lot of correspondence if you specify all the models of the units in question. Thanks for dropping by and sorry for your loss. Prerecorded MDs are sometimes of interest because they are rare (for example there has been exaggerated interest in Michael Jackson and Celine Dion). In most cases, however, you're selling the recordABLE disks for the media. In this case, you could list how many by make, capacity (60, 74 or 80 are the nominal sizes at Standard Play recording speed), and colour. Stephen
  22. sfbp
    I was about to ask the same thing, of you, Freddy. The biggest reason to use a deck, IMNSHO, is that all recordings on either input to a deck appear to get filtered in such a manner as to ensure good recordings at the data rate the recording is made. As well, lots of "stuff" (Jim Hoggarth tried to explain to me, and I can see them on the schematic, but I wouldn't really know a filter circuit from a female Ursa Minorian's bra size) is there to clean up the signal and generally get rid of noise. The same recording made on a portable is often not as good, although it may well be that HiMD portables have already implemented some of the "stuff" in the massive ASIC which is the brains of the MD recorder. Bottom line - many of the artifacts I'd get by a straight line-in (or optical in) to a relatively simple computer backplane sound card are gone. To me this is the joy of a minidisc deck. It may be that very fancy I/O cards on a PC are compensated, I have no idea. But Sony did a fabulous job. The biggest trick is cutting off frequencies above the threshold (I believe this is referred to as "mastering" but NGY or someone will correct me on that point and all the above rather wishy-washy explanation, I'm sure) so that bits are not wasted, and then reallocating bits using Type-R, in order to make good recordings EVEN IN LP4 mode. Stephen PS I have never used a filter by pushing buttons. I think they're implicit in editors like Sound Forge when you transform the sound, but again that may be my fanciful imagination.
  23. sfbp
    There's no reason you cannot play BBC out the optical port of your computer and record directly to MD. Just takes time, is all. The effective conversion from broadcast to ATRAC will be much more reliable. Note that the BBC used to use ATRAC for just about everything (they sold off all their workhorse MD units about 4 years ago, they turned up on eBay), so that certainly is a measure of the quality. BBC were renowned in the business for good broadcast quality.
  24. sfbp
    Well.... we're not here because of being sensible.
  25. sfbp
    Cool it guys. Philippe was trying to be helpful as always. No sarcasm, I am certain. He's right, you are trying to reinvent NetMD. For a few bucks you could achieve what you want automatically.
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