Richard

Seasons Greetings Kevin and everyone else on the forum! Stay safe indeed and let's hope 2021 is an improvement on 2020

The majority of the discs with plastic shutters were made by Maxell (both Maxell Japan and Maxell Europe). BASF, Denon, Verbatim and Sharp also had plastic shutter discs, but all of these were also manufactured by Maxell for those companies. Maxell's reasoning for using the plastic shutter was that it vibrated less than the metal shutter during operation and also provided a tighter fit, preventing less dust from possibly entering the disc. Quite a few people in past complained about the plastic shutters being too flimsy, breaking off or getting jammed in the mechanism of the player. There were also some reports of them warping in very high temperature settings and jamming the loading mechanism of the player. I never had any issues personally, but it would be good to understand as others have said, to know exactly what kind of disc you are using and whether the same plastic shutter discs work in other players (if you have any). The 1GB Hi-MD discs (of which there are only two variations) both have metal shutters. Also lastly, what error does the NH700 give exactly with these kinds of discs?

* Moved to Minidisc sub-forum

Wow, really great work. Thanks! Hopefully someone here can test this with some other units as well and report their findings

Sorry for the late reply, but essentially my answer is the same as Stephen's. In the past I did have contacts directly in Japan or used independent middlemen services to import things, but as Stephen said the easiest way these days is to use a "proxy" service such as the ones he mentioned. I use a different one called ZenMarket, but I think the principle is essentially the same. They provide their own kind of user interface through their site that allows you to bid on Yahoo Japan auctions and purchase from any other online store in Japan. You do need to keep an eye on "hidden" costs. Again these vary between the different services, but for example with ZenMarket you can bid on the auction and then on top of that you may need to factor in shipping costs within Japan to the warehouse of the forwarder. These costs are sometimes free depending on the seller and type of item but are usually listed in the auction listing if you read it carefully. Other costs may include combining multiple items into one package (ZenMarket don't charge for this), the shipping costs to your country and depending on what you are importing you may also incur customs charges (usually VAT in the UK), but this also depends on the value of the goods you are importing and by which method (courier, normal postal services). So yes, you do need to watch out for these things or at least budget for them in advance, but I think on the plus side if you are careful you can still find a huge variety of things that you would never find on eBay and even including the various add-on costs, there are still some good deals to be had.. But if you want some detailed examples feel free to drop me a pm..

There does seem to be a lot of minidisc blanks available on eBay from what I can see, but the prices for me seem to be relatively high. I actually do import the majority of my blanks from Japan and even when you factor in shipping and VAT charges when importing to the UK, the average price per disc I think is still favourable and there are some good deals to be had on both new and used discs on Yahoo Japan. You can often get some great deals on bundles. For example, recent things I have picked up in the last couple of months include: TDK M discs - sealed 10 packs for less than 10 GBP Bundle of 44 "Used" discs for 17 GBP, but which included a sealed 10 pack of TDK Lucir and a sealed 5 pack of TDK "Wa" Bundle of 18 sealed discs - including sealed 10 pack of TDK Little Man and 8 other sealed TDK / Sony - 20 GBP Axia 2 x 5 Sealed Slim Packs - 12 GBP TDK Fine - Sealed 5 pack for 3 GBP I do see a few interesting discs on eBay, but the prices all seem to be on average at least 2-3 GBP per disc or more.

It depends.. The install itself takes seconds, it's just next, next next... Then once it's installed, there are only about 2 or 3 options I ever check or change from the defaults - the main one being the import bit rate when ripping from CD's. If you are just using to import CD's and transfer them to MD, that's all you really need.

Yes, I will try and put together an install guide and we can put the installer up on the downloads section if anyone is interested. Unfortunately the main UI is only in Japanese, but I can include some pointers. I was trying to find the topic, but we did have a member who did a localization of X-appli into English by modifying some of the resource files. It worked fine up until about version 1.1, but for version 2.0 and later (the final version was version 6.0 from 2016) it no longer worked and I wasn't able to track him down to follow up (this was quite a few years ago).. I guess the good thing about X-appli is that it works natively on Windows 10. It is still not a complete unicode-compliant app (presumably because it still has old Sonic Stage code in it), so if you install it on a non-Japanese version of Windows and want to do Kanji or Hangul titling you will need to use a locale emulator (something like this one works well).

* Topic moved to Software forum

I just tested some CD ripping on X-Appli version 6.0 and Gracenote still appears to be working when ripping CD's to Atrac 3+. You can also change the Gracenote language settings in the options menu (so if you want English tags)

* Edit: Restored original images

* Edit: Restored original photos. I will endeavor to re-shoot this pictorial as soon as I am able.

* Edit: Restored original images from gallery

From what I can see in the service manual there is indeed an internal battery, but I was unable to confirm if the part listed on p.95 of the PDF was just the battery holder or the battery itself. You may want to refer to this topic also for some more information. * Topic renamed

Only a year late to this thread, but I concur it looks good! :-)

Ciao Sergio, Just wanted to say your sites are a great resource for all of us who appreciate Minidisc. Please keep up the good work.

If I was doing this I would do the following (I am assuming the FLAC and WAV's are all 16-bit 44.1 khz which may or may not be your case) 1. Use the FLAC command line tools to batch uncompress all the .flac files into .wavs (the audio information contained in a flac file is exactly the same as a WAV it just takes up less space) 2. Import the WAVS into Sonic Stage or X Player or whatever 3. Edit the metadata in the application 4. Transfer to MD and use the transfer settings to convert on the fly to Atrac3+ But as other people have there are probably a few other ways of doing it.

Can't you just de-compress FLAC to WAV losslessly via the command line FLAC tools? You shouldn't lose anything in this process quality wise, but obviously if you then transcode this to Atrac or Atrac3+ then you are compressing the files and eliminating some information.

I may be wrong but, couldn't you also decompress the FLAC files to WAV and then transfer using SS (optionally converting to Atrac in the process). I think this would work if you were going to Atrac3+ but not sure it's the best route if you want to go to traditional SP or LP2.

Nice - I am also a big fan of Sony's shortwave radios and have several myself.

For me if you want to charge the NH1 through it's cradle and not have to charge its batteries via another unit, then you are better off getting a 6V ac adaptor and avoiding USB altogether.

Even though the PSP pin might fit the base I am not sure if it will charge as the NH1 original AC adaptor was not AC to USB like the RH1 it was a straight AC in adaptor of 6v i think. If I recall the PSP AC adaptor is 5.5. You used to be able to get these Universal AC adaptors from Sony like this: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Sony-6V-AC-E60A-World-110-240-V-Universal-Ac-Adapter-Standard-Plug-No-Box-E-60-A-/231142858460?pt=Multipurpose_AC_to_DC_Adapters&hash=item35d1301edc Not sure if you could maybe find one at a lower price

* Moved to software forum

If would advise a copy of X-Application as this effectively replaced Sonic Stage V. However I don't believe it is compatible with XP. Are you able to install a JP copy of Vista or Windows 7 into a VM. Let me know, and I will see what I can do. If you do only have access to Windows XP I should have a copy of Sonic Stage V on an external HDD or possibly SS 4.x on a physical CD that came with the DH10P. I will have to dig around a bit. Edit: I have just found Japanese copies of SS 4.3, 3.0 and I probably have a 2.x version somewhere. I'll let you know if I find SS V and if it is XP compatible. * Moved to software sub-forum

I am using Chrome without issue but can confirm if I use IE11, then the Quote / MulitQuote functionality isn't working. To get around it you can hit F12 and enable the IE10 compatibility settings as shown in the attached image.