A440

Has anyone been using the MC40ELK for live recording? What does it control in that context? Specifically: Can you get into the REC SET menu to set Rec Volume to Manual? Can you read the recording level backlit? Can you change the recording level? Can you insert track marks from the remote? Thanks.

Get TotalRecoder ($11.95 US) and it will intercept and record whatever is playing through your soundcard. It makes .wav files that Sonicstage can download to your MD. You can also try the free version of Stepvoice (the freeware version) from this page, and see if it will record the RealAudio as mp3. Change its default bitrate to at least 128 kbps.

You might just get a pair of small binaurals and make your own cushion/stand for them, separating them by about 6 inches for a nice stereo spread. These are tiny and very lifelike-sounding http://www.soundprofessionals.com/cgi-bin/gold/item/SP-BMC-2 Sometimes you can also find them on Ebay sold by Soundprofessionals for $29. Another very unobtrusive solution is in-ear binaurals that just look like little earbuds. http://www.soundprofessionals.com/cgi-bin/gold/item/SP-TFB-2 What you hear is what you get. You can also find one-point stereo omni mics, but separation helps a lot.

This probably isn't the problem, but check to see if the write-protect tab got slid so it's partly open. It has to be closed (unprotected) so SonicStage can mark the disc.

What happened was that your mic preamp (at Mic-In) overloaded with rock concert bass, though the rolloff should have eliminated some of that. Mic Sensitivity is, unfortunately, applied after the signal has gone through the preamp, so it's too late. But you should use Low in any case. You have the battery box so you can run through Line-In, which bypasses the preamp. It will probably give you a fairly quiet but clean recording that you can then amplify with any sound-editing program. So yes, Mic--Battbox--Line-In, Manual Volume, Low Sens (though I have no idea whether that makes any difference since you're not going through Mic-In). The volume should probably be fairly high but keep an eye on the level. The mics on your hat sound like a good setup if you're not turning your head a lot.

Line-In expects a strong signal. It is for recording out of another piece of equipment, like a CD player, mixer, computer or, if you're using a microphone, a preamp or battery box. For more on line-in, see this: http://forums.minidisc.org/index.php?showtopic=7989 Mic-In is for the weaker signal that comes through a microphone. It sends the signal into a preamp. If you're recording a live source, you can go Mic-Mic-in, or get a battery module (which gives the mic enough power to go into Line-in, and makes it perform better) or a preamp and go Mic--Module--Line-in. Recording with a Mic and battery module into Line-in will give you a quieter, but perhaps fuller sound than you get through mic-in, and you avoid the potential of the preamp overloading (which happens with many microphones receiving any significant amount of bass). See the pinned topic on the Radio Shack Attenuator for an alternative to the battery module. http://forums.minidisc.org/index.php?showtopic=9069

bigbeefdog is probably getting super-booming bass, which is why he's having to roll off the bottom two octaves of the music. But as he says, mic placement makes a difference. If you're an audience member it's probably not going to be as overwhelmingly bass-y where you're listening. 16 Hz is below the 20-20,000 Hz your MD is supposed to pick up, so that may or may not make any difference at all. If you do feel there's a lot of bass in the room, I suggest 69 Hz for starters, but use your ears in the particular room. Is the mix weighted extremely strongly toward the bass? Can you feel the air being pushed by the woofer? Then go up to 95 Hz. Ideally, do a test with the opening band and go higher if you need to.

Well, my Sonic Stage 3.0 is flipping out. Uploaded a three-hour, 55-track concert with that as the sole foreground app on the computer. During the upload, SS stopped three times and generated unspecified errors. After the first time, I made sure it hadn't messed up the original disc, rebooted, reopened SS and started uploading at the next track. I used TotalRecorder to get the tracks where it stopped. But while editing to burn the CD, I have just discovered that those weren't the only screwed-up tracks. Like the tracks it stopped on, a few of the other tracks, showing no discernible pattern, were timestamped (on both upload and disc) and, in SS, showed the correct length. But they only held 5-20 seconds of song before stopping dead. Converting them to .wav as an experiment, they were only a few hundred kilobytes; the silence was not part of the track, even though SS showed the correct length. Once I had grabbed a missed track via TotalRecorder, I tried uploading it again. Erased with no warning. That part of SonicStage never stops working. They were all Hi-SP, which has been giving other people problems too, I see. Sony Support? "We are sorry for the inconvenience." Perhaps I should be grateful that it's leaving the disc intact when it botches the upload.

By the way, bitrate (196, 256) has nothing to do with loudness. Bitrate is the quality of the compression. The loudness depends on the original material. If you have a high-bitrate version of a quiet recording, it will still be quiet.

Optical/digital out isn't a file transfer. The only way to copy playable music faster than realtime to the MD is via USB and SonicStage, which won't transfer DRM'd music. You need to get the WMA files out of their DRM wrapper. You should experiment with rippers and encoders like dbpoweramp ( www.dbpoweramp.com ), foobar ( www.foobar2000.com ) or others. See if any of them can turn your .wma files into .mp3s or .wavs. I'd try it myself, but I don't have any DRM files. If those files are locked down, you could use TotalRecorder, play them in a music player (realtime) and record them as .wav files, and then transfer them via SonicStage. If there is a difference between recording them via optical out (which would be realtime) or transferring them via SonicStage, it's probably negligible, and the amount of time spent would be significantly shorter with the SonicStage transfer. You can transfer them as PCM (.wav quality) if you don't mind using a whole lot of discs, or SonicStage will encode them into ATRAC--that's what it does--so you wouldn't need or want to encode them first. You don't get the same quality just because the bitrate number is the same. Every time you compress you're losing quality. The 128 kbps mp3's are already compressed, and Hi-SP and Hi-LP compress the material further, like taking a grainy photograph of an already grainy photograph. Technically, you want to get as much resolution as you can, so it's better to use the higher bitrate. But it's up to you and your ears. If you're out jogging on the street with little portable headphones, Hi-LP might well be good enough. I use it to pack a dozen albums onto an 80-minute disc for car trips. But if you're in a quiet room with good 'phones, you'll hear the difference.

You could doublecheck with Sony, but from www.sonystyle.com it appears not since they're not mentioned. The NH1 and NH900 have digital pitch control.

It will be a radical improvement from your current mic. You'll hear bass that wasn't there before, and you'll have better stereo separation and probably a more realistic response across the frequency spectrum.

I hate to say it, but you could also start from scratch again with new mics. The ones you have are very cumbersome with the L-shaped enclosures and the Y-plug adapter. The Sound Professionals BMC-2's (www.soundprofessionals.com) are probably made with the same basic microphone capsules, but they're tiny and on a thin stereo lead. They're around $29 U.S. plus shipping, from the company itself or sold by the company on Ebay. You could put your current mics back on Ebay, and with the exchange rate, the new ones wouldn't set you back too much. I use them and while I have overloaded them at a few shows, it wasn't easy to do. Most of the time the attenuator is enough (at full volume, as greenmachine says). Maybe you lads play louder in England.

Here's a link: the MediaJoin freeware is on the left side of the page. http://www.audiovideosoft.com/

This isn't a job for SonicStage. You need an audio editing program like Audacity. http://audacity.sourceforge.net Copy the track from the CD onto your computer. Go to My Computer and Explore the CD drive. If all you see are 1KB .cda files then you need to get the .wav file. You can do that with CDex http://cdexos.sourceforge.net/ which will list all the .wav files on the CD. Copy the last song to your desktop, or wherever, and then open it (Shift held down, right-click, Open With... will be in the menu) with Audacity. You'll see the whole song as a waveform, and you can highlight/select and delete the silence, then highlight the hidden track and make a new file out of it. When you're done, instead of Save, use "Export as .wav." It's just like word-processing, only with a waveform.

I have Norton Antivirus and Internet Security and Black Ice Firewall, I scan regularly for viruses with Norton and Trendmicro, and I scan regularly for spyware (alternating between Spybot and Ad-Aware). I don't find any because I don't let any in. I use Firefox for browsing (and Netscape and Mozilla and Opera before that) and Eudora for e-mail. I don't open the few stray attachments that aren't caught by my company's mail server. I scan every program and .doc that I open, including programs downloaded from minidisc.org. I have 5 different music players (Winamp, WMP, RealPlayer, Quintessential, Foobar2000) installed along with SonicStage, which I wouldn't exactly call a music player. I have some audio-editing apps, rippers and Nero. They don't seem to bother each other. For that matter, I have a Sony VAIO computer, which promises Video Audio Integrated Operation. And yet I had a hellish time installing SonicStage 3.0, with exactly the symptoms described by other posters on this unfortunately very popular forum. I don't install every update from Windows instantly, and no, I still haven't installed SP2 because I don't want to go around patching other programs for days on end. But I don't think the standard for a program should be whether it works on a computer maintained by a computer expert with a fast internet connection for Microsoft's endless updates. The standard should be that it works in the real world. To blame it all on viruses or spyware is just a little too complacent. And while I'm on my soapbox, why are we saddled with SonicStage at all? We have a data drive on one end of a USB, a PC on the other. It's a two-way connection. Why can't I just take the digital files I've recorded and drag-and-drop them wherever I want? Why can't I take my mp3s, put them in a folder and have them appear as a group on my MD, the way SimpleBurner works for CDs? Why should I have to worry that SonicStage is going to crash or randomly destroy unique recordings? Why should I have to authenticate my database with some mysterious computer in Sonyland? The problem with SonicStage isn't that users aren't computer-savvy enough to use it. The problem is that Sony keeps it as a complicated DRM mishmash instead of a simple PC-to-MD interface. I feel better already.

This is by not a fix but insurance: I would suggest using your Track button to divide those huge files into smaller tracks. That way, if Sonic Stage massacres one the whole concert won't be gone. I've had my own troubles with Sonic Stage lately, including unexplained error messages like yours, but I've then gone back and uploaded the rest of the concert, skipping the track with the error and using Dex's old TotalRecorder method to get it.

Microphones have different specs than your ears. Turning down the volume on loud music can indeed reveal sonic nuances. Microphones do overload too--they have maximum sound pressure levels in their specs--but your initial problem was that your mic preamp was overloading, and I hope that the distortion you got on your second recording was still preamp overload rather than the mics themselves overloading. If it was the mics overloading, and you're going to be going to a lot of loud shows, then you could use the more electronically correct alternative to the attenuator: running the mics through a battery box, which gives them added power to handle more sound, and then through Line-In. But that's one more cigarette-pack-sized box to add to your stealth problems. An easier solution: stand further back from the stage. Is the NH1 remote helping you in the recording situation? Does it have a level readout on it or a way of making track marks? I've got the NHF-800, with a different remote, and I do all my controlling on the machine itself. If it's not useful, you could leave the remote home. As for your mics, they should go mics--extension leads--Y-plug--attenuator--Mic-In. I hide mic wires down my shirtfront and clip the mics to my collar, then run the lead out along my belt loops to the MD in a pocket.

Mic-in by definition means there is a preamp. It's not a great preamp if you're recording anything that has loud bass or drums, but no one has detected any difference between models. Similarly, all the Hi-MDs (except NH-600D, which is for downloading music from the computer, and NH-600, with Line-In but not Mic-In) apparently have similar recording capabilities. The difference is in other features: the lighted display on the RH10, etc. Look in the Browser on the homepage to compare them. The NH1 will record live in both old MD (SP, LP2, LP4) and Hi-MD (PCM, Hi-SP, Hi-LP) modes, so if your priority were to play back your live recordings on an older MD unit, you should get the NH1. BUT the old MD modes do not upload via USB, so if you're planning to upload your recordings to your PC, then the backwards compatibility is irrelevant. If you can find one, the first-generation Hi-MDs are also good for live recording. I have an NHF-800 that I chose because it takes a regular AA-sized battery rather than a rechargeable gumstick (and outboard AA battery pack); NH-700 is the same thing minus an FM-radio remote, but I couldn't find one. All the information on remotes is here--check and see exactly which remote they're offering with the MD you're going to buy. But Sony has not yet had the intelligence to put a simple "Record" button on a remote. They're mostly designed for playback. http://forums.minidisc.org/index.php?showt...t=0entry52998

I should have realized that the attenuator was giving you a less lever-ed connection, sorry about that. Looking at the picture got me worried. Phase information is important, but all the technical blather in the world won't convince you as much as an experiment. If you record in mono and listen through headphones you'll get a one-dimensional sound in the middle of your head. If you record in stereo with a one-point mic, essentially what you're doing now, you'll get a slightly expanded one-dimensional sound--richer than mono, but still constricted. If you separate the mics by six inches or more, with or without a barrier in between them (google "Jecklin disc" if you want to read the tech discussions), you'll feel like you're in the room. Set your stereo to mono and try separated and un-separated. I couldn't believe it either at first, but I'm convinced. The only reason for recording in mono on minidisc was to maintain stealth in the old days by conserving the disc space, and while it may have made for an irreplaceable document of the show, it wasn't exactly fun listening. Even with a mono mix through the PA, you're getting spatial information from the amps onstage, from the drum kit, and from all the resonances of the room. Really, try it if you can separate those mics. And definitely move on up from SS 2.1 . Sonic Stage was a disgrace before 2.3, and 3.0 is within hailing distance of actually being useful.

The site itself was slow when I tried to download before, it's working fine now. I think dropping the Manual Volume a few notches would have been ideal because the bass and bass drums are still fuzzing out, but you're clearly on the right track. The way to get better stereo is to separate the mics further. Each of your ears gets slightly different information that lets your brain build a 3D image. If the mics are right next to each other, they're getting the same information. Looking at the photo, that mic tries to have some separation but is limited by its size. Getting the mics even a few more inches apart, like the width of your ears, will give a much rounder sound. If the mics unplug from that Y-connector, you could get two extension cords and run them from mics to Y-plug. Clip the mics to eyeglasses frames, a hat, your shoulders, a shirt collar, etc., and it will open up the stereo image. Also, if you know someone who's good with a soldering iron, you could also have them wire the two mic leads from the extension cords into a smaller stereo miniplug. That big Y adapter works like a lever inside your mic jack if it gets pushed in any direction, and will make your mic jack wear out sooner. PCM uploading is slow--the main bottleneck is the USB 1.0 connection from the MD, along with your computer's processing speed, because you're sending a lot of information as PCM. No real solution that I know of except to have your computer do as little other processing as possible while you upload. What version of SonicStage are you using? If you upgrade to 3.x, it will have a built-in .wav converter and you won't have to worry about it once you've done the upload. Of course it should just be drag-and-drop from MD as data drive to Soundforge, without the whole .oma intermediate stage. But Sony doesn't think so....

First, don't convert in LP4, the quality is just too low. Use SP or LP2. Three guesses (and they are only guesses): 1) Are the original songs in either low-bitrate mp3 (48 or 64 kbps) or variable-bitrate mp3? SonicStage can have problems with those (and they sound pretty bad to begin with). or 2) Is your MD plugged into a multiple-USB port? It should be plugged directly into the computer. or 3) Are you running other processor-intensive programs simultaneously on your computer? Browser, e-mail, music players? You've got a fast processor, but SonicStage is a resources hog, and maybe it's skipping because other programs are competing for computer power. Look in your taskbar and close anything you don't need that's running in the background: Realplayer, Outlook, Adobe, other stuff that might have loaded on startup (right-click on the icon, Close or Exit). If you want to disconnect from the Internet while you do your transfer, you could also close antivirus or firewall programs. Try shutting down whatever you can that's not SonicStage, and then doing the transfer. SonicStage doesn't play nice with the other children. Also, try running an antivirus scan from here (via Internet Explorer) and make sure nothing is hijacking your computer. http://housecall.trendmicro.com/

First, don't worry about a driver, it's included in SonicStage. A driver is the way your computer communicates with an external device, like a printer or the MD. OMG Jukebox is the prehistoric version of SonicStage, and it was probably on the CD--don't worry about that either, as long as you've uninstalled the directories from the FAQ. Unplug everything from your USB ports in case that's confusing SonicStage. Are you running a lot of other things simultaneously on your computer while trying to install SonicStage? An e-mail client, other browser windows, a music player? Some of them probably start automatically with your computer. Look in the taskbar (probably lower right on Windows) and if you have Realplayer, Windows Media Player, Winamp, Outlook, etc. running, right-click on them and Close or Exit them. They'll restart the next time you reboot your computer--you're just getting them out of the way for the Sonic Stage installation. See if that helps.

There's also CDex http://cdexos.sourceforge.net/ All rippers depend on what kind of CD/DVD drive you have, but it's worth a try.

Audacity http://audacity.sourceforge.net has a number of possibilities under Effect, including a straightfoward Amplify, Normalize (which will even out the level of the recording), Equalization, Bass Boost and filters. Highlight the passage you want to play with (or Select All) and you can apply the effects. The only kink with Audacity is terminology: instead of Save, you need to use "Export to (.wav,.mp3, .ogg)" to save your file in a standard format.