Bazirker

To give a simpler answer... If you have an optical cable, use it. It'll sound the best. However, it sounds like you don't. Your next best option is to use your computer's audio out to make an analog recording. You will definetly have an audio out; that's the jack that the speakers plug into. Now whether or not to go gold plated....gold plating is supposed to sound better. I personally have never tested the differences (or lack thereof) in sound quality between gold plated and normal cables. However, I have never noticed a difference between them. If you want, go for the gold-tipped cable, it should only cost a few dollars more. It looks cooler...lol. Cable length is essentially irrelevant since I have yet to see a cable long enough to cause problems in recording quality. As MX400 said, anything less than 15 ft (5 meters) should be fine. Hope that helped!

No no. If you want to convert cd's to atrac, I assume you mean you want to put your cd's on md because it isn't possible to record atrac on the computer (the comp only records atrac3, which is a different codec. If you just want atrac3, meaning lp2 or lp4, then just use openmg or sonicstage to rip the cd's onto your computer. BUT, if you want to put them on minidisc, you can make your recordings using a digital realtime TOSLINK connection and then win nmd can access freedb and title the tracks for you so you don't have to. If I still haven't quite figured out what you're trying to do, I apologize...

Oh yeah...duh. Actually, win nmd uses freedb. Either way, what's the difference? Free track titles are free track titles.

To add to the long list of earbud questions... I want to get a good pair of earbuds. I have some US$10 sony buds that I like a lot except they are somewhat lacking in sound quality and get uncomfortable after awhile. Now that a think about it, I really don't like them much at all, except they are small and portable...so basically I want to get a new pair that are small and portable but that don't hurt and sound good. I read that the canal-type buds are more comfortable especially when you sleep and frequently have better sound quality, but I don't know how accurate that is. My budget is kinda tight, so roughly US$50 is the most I can afford to spend. Any recommendations?

Good to hear it! Well, if you're selling your md to a kid at school...I know this sounds bad, but sell it to him for as much as he's willing to buy it for. As for buying something non-netmd, I recommend giving NetMD a shot. It doesn't add that much to the cost of a recorder, and you certainly don't lose anything with a recorder that has NetMD capabilities vs one that doesn't. A lot of people talk as if a netmd recorder is inferior to a non-netmd recorder, which simply isn't true. I'd say my N10 can match anything short of a DR7 easy without taking netmd into consideration at all (and honestly I don't like the lay-out of Sharps, so I'd get an N10 over a DR7 even if the N10 didn't have netmd.) So, just keep in mind NetMD is an EXTRA feature, not an anti-feature.

Yeah I think combine is limited to things like Sharp units. Sony models just add or delete individual track marks which in my opinion is simpler.

Sonicstage can do it, so can simple burner, and win nmd can look at tracks on an MD and do freedb stuff. Sonicstage should've come with your md. Win NMD can be found at the stickied link on the NetMD forum on which this was posted.

You can just peel your labels off and they don't leave a sticky residue or anything? My labels must suck. Perhaps I'm going to Office Depot tomorrow... And as far as deleting a disk's content, good music is good music, but over time you might find you want to listen to another cd and might not have the money to go buy more disks. But that's all beside the point. Dude, your labels own.

Simple Burner has a little box on the left side towards the top that allows you t select the drive letter that SB is trying to find a cd in. Make sure that you have your virtual drive selected and not a different drive. I doubt that's your problem because my copy of SB automatically detects loaded cd's, but it's worth double-checking. Otherwise I don't really have any idea why it won't work if you're doing exactly what you did before.

That looks pretty cool! The only problem with that is you essentially turned rewritable discs into permanent discs (unless you wouldn't care that you're trance mix is on a disc labelled From Chaos.) What I do instead is just take a Sharpie and put numbers on each disc. Disc 1 is my current mix, disc 2 is acoustic stuff, 3 is Tool, 4 is Swift, etc. However, if I was going to permanently label a disc's content, you've come up with a darn cool way to do it!

I see what you mean; the way you said it before made it sound like you thought the Aiwa headphones wouldn't work right with a Sony md unit. Just as a thought, I think Sony headphones are generally more expensive than other brands and you'd likely be better off with a different brand (such as the ones suggested above.)

did you load the image to the virtual drive using imagedrive?

I made one awhile ago, perhaps I should make a NetMD FAQ/tutorial thing. Either way my old faq needs to be updated.

Drummz, I have both good and bad news for you...first the bad news. When you tell Sonicstage to send SP quality audio to your netmd unit, it doesn't actually send SP quality audio. Instead, it sends the music you encoded in LP2 format to your NetMD unit and that is converted to SP audio...the bad part is that because the original file was in LP2, the LP2>SP conversion doesn't actually improve the sound quality at all. So when you send SP audio via NetMD, it is really what I like to call "phantom LP2." The good news is that what you've been listening to and thinking was SP quality is actually LP2 quality. So if you think the audio you've been listening to sounds ok, then you can now double how much music you have on each disc (and cut transfer time at least in half) without hearing a difference in quality from what you've been hearing. If you'd like to read some more on the subject, look at this thread: http://forums.minidisc.org/viewtopic.php?t=1010 and if you really want to look up more on the subject then check out the link towards the bottom of that thread. So to answer your question, they didn't bother to put SP mode transfer on the Simple Burner program because Sonicstage can't actually do real SP transfers to begin with.

Hey Golden, why does it matter if the headphones are a different brand from the unit? To the best of my knowledge, it's not like the units discriminate against other brands. A headphones jack is, well, a headphones jack regardless of the company that made it and the headphones that you use to play back the music shouldn't really care. I mean I could be wrong...but I doubt it.

Yes. You have it record from your computer's line-in jack or the iMic. I don't have imic so I'm not totally sure how it works, but cool edit definetly can record from the imic.

Are you selling your md unit? It'd better not be so you can go buy a solid state or some silly thing like that or else we'll all have to track you down, come to your house and give you noogies...heh heh. Naw we'd all just acknowledge that you'd gone to the dark side...get then pun? Seriously now, I'd pay roughly US$100 for an MZ-R700, here's why. Considering that you can get an MZ-N505 for $88 now and I'd rather have a new 505 than a used 700 (505 has atrac type R, NetMD, etc, but not a mic jack,) you'd be getting a hell of a good deal (and screwing the person buying it from you) if you sold your MD for over $100. But I dunno, get on eBay and see what 700's are going for nowadays.

Owwwwwwww.... Naw man I've heard of Koss before, BUT I've never used any of their stuff before or known anyone who has, so I might as well have not heard of them. The reason I inquired about those buds is because I've seen them in the store before but I haven't seen any other kind of in-canal type buds anywhere else (except Radio Shack brand, and they are basically the exact same thing at The Plug.) It was just easier to say I'd never heard of them before than to explain why I was interested and stuff. Anyway, thanks for the tip. Heh heh.

No power = No time. Found that out the hard way. I hate how they have the power set up on the N10...it pisses me off that you have to run down the internal battery before it will switch to internal and I hate how you have to have the internal battery "on" in order for the unit to work at all. I wouldn't be so bad if they hadn't put the battery switch on the back, showing that they actually thought about giving the user a choice about where battery power comes from...but as it turns out there is essentially no point in that switch at all considering that if it is off the unit can't get power so the clock loses its time and you always have to run down the internal battery first anyway before any other source can be used.

You're talking about the $20 Koss in-ear canal type buds, right? I was thinking about buying them the other day, but they don't look like they wouldn't be very comfy, and I haven't even heard of Koss so I don't know how they sound. One of the things I want canal-type buds for is sleeping with the side of my head on a pillow, so comfort is a big deal...but as always, so is sound quality. Could anyone give me a bit more of an in depth "review" of them?

If it has a digital out, you aren't necessarily stuck, you could get a digital converter and use the md program for track marks (if necessary.) Speaking of this software, what is it? Is there anywhere I can get a free copy?

Yeah, I find that LP2 recorded via NetMD sounds noticably better than optically recorded LP2. Optically recorded SP does sound better than NetMD LP2, although the difference isn't much. HOWEVER, if you're the type that frequently sits down with some good headphones and really listens to music, you can hear weaknesses in NetMD LP2 that will not be heard in SP mode. As a result, most of my music is recorded in LP2 (25 discs worth) while I have a few other discs for SP stuff (10 discs...but note that these ten discs hold 80 minute of music a piece while the LP2 discs hold twice that, making the amount of LP2 music I have compared to SP mode come out as a 5:1 ratio.) So yes, there definetly is a point to SP mode. I bet if NetMD was capable of REAL SP mode transfer and not just phantom LP2 quality I'd hardly use LP2 at all.

MDX400...awwww man, you beat me to it!

The NE410 can only download tracks from your computer; it has no recording capabilites. However, the N510 can record from analog or digital sources (not mic though) as well as from thr computer. When you say adaptor, do you mean power adaptor or audio adaptor? If it comes with a car kit, it likely has a 120V power adaptor for your house, a 12V adaptor for your car, and a tape deck adaptor so you can play md through your car's stereo if it has a tape deck.

I think we have the same converter...isn't there a little switch on there that chooses the input? Make sure you have that adjusted correctly.