A440

Once you run the File Conversion Tool, the library is entirely portable, playable on any SonicStage. It's a lot easier than the old method of running the Backup Tool, knocking on wood and crossing your fingers.

Wish it was on a cord. The weight of that thing is going to put major strain on the mic jack. Guess you an add a little extension cord, but what were they thinking?

If you're just starting out, minidisc is a very quirky recorder because it records in its own format--not .mp3 or .wav. It requires special software to upload, and if you have a Mac, only the most expensive minidisc recorders are compatible. You have to upload and then convert the recording to .wav or .mp3 to be played back on most people's machines. Note: You also need to buy a microphone with any minidisc recorder, and for loud music you also need an additional gadget, a battery module, to prevent the minidisc from overloading and recording only distortion. You might be better off with a straightforward digital recorder with built-in mics. For instance: the Samson Zoom H2 http://www.samsontech.com/products/product...cfm?prodID=1916 or the soon-to-be-released Tascam DR-1 http://www.tascam.com/products/dr-1.html Both are around $175-$250. The Roland Edirol R09 has a pathetic display and is more expensive, but I got a good rock-band rehearsal recording with one by just pushing the Record button. I haven't tried the other two recorders, but if you Google around you'll find a lot of opinions on the Samson Zoom H2. http://www.rolandus.com/products/productde...px?ObjectId=757

Those are all very old-school MDs. The only way to get music into them is to record in realtime, and the only way to get music out of them is to record out of the headphone jack, also in realtime. The only one I have owned is the MZ-R700. Its update over the other two is that it records in MDLP, which lets you double the length of a disc in LP2 and quadruple it in LP4--at a loss of sound quality you will be able to hear. The R50 is supposed to be very tough and to have a very good mic preamp. Here's the page on the Aiwa. http://www.minidisc.org/part_Aiwa_AM-F65+F70.html Here's the R700 hack. http://forums.minidisc.org/index.php?showt...ld+hack+Mz-r700

The DS70P mic that comes with the MZ-M200 is bass-deprived--frequency response is 100-15000 Hz. Better to get the MZ-RH1 and a good microphone, or get the H2. The microphone is much more important than the bitrate. A high-resolution recording of a bad source, like the DS70P mic, will sound much worse than a high-quality mp3 recording (over 192 kbps) of a good mic. Think about your recording situation--studio? performance? line-in from a mixer?--and choose a good microphone.

Purelionz-- The first thing you should know is that the minidisc unit does not have a built-in microphone. If you don't have a stereo microphone, you will need one--unless you have a soundboard connection and can record from a line cable. To record a loud concert you will also need at minimum an attenuator (Maplins VC-1, probably about £4) or, better, a battery module (about £30), which you can get (along with a microphone) from Greenmachine as explained in this thread: http://forums.minidisc.org/index.php?showtopic=14388 If you are new to minidisc you should also be aware that to upload the recording from the NH-700 you need to have a PC running (free) Sony software called SonicStage. The RH1 is Mac compatible. For newbies to concert recording, there are less complicated alternatives now--all with built-in mics and no hassle in uploading--just drag-and-drop into your computer. You should look at the Samson Zoom H2, the Edirol R09 and the soon-to-be-released Tascam DR 1 as noted here: http://forums.minidisc.org/index.php?showtopic=20559

Put your mics up as high as you can. Mic-->battery module-->Line-in. Use REC SET to put REC Level at Manual Volume. Check levels during the opening act, probably around 20/30 (depending on mic, volume, etc.), and then set them and leave them alone. Stand where it sounds good to your ears and away from noisy people. Probably not right up front, since the PA will be pointed further out toward the crowd. Near the soundboard is generally good, but go with what your ears tell you.

Guitarfxr is right--if it's just a matter of lowering the bass, you can do it yourself in Audacity, following his instructions. However, and I'm sorry to say this, if you have distortion--if the bass just obliterates or overloads the whole recording, so that you can't hear anything but the distortion--then you aren't going to be able to fix it, and a professional won't be able to do any better.

I'm on a PC, but the easiest way to do a perfect merge is to Combine tracks in SonicStage. Does the Mac software have a similar function? Otherwise you'll just have to try Audacity or another editing program and see what you get. I don't remember hearing clicks when I have appended tracks, but I don't do it very often. Here's another free editor that works on Mac. Haven't tried it. http://traverso-daw.org/download.html

First, you need a recent SonicStage, 3.4 or above. Under Tools in SonicStage is Save as .wav. Highlight the tracks you want to edit and do that. .Wav files are big, about 10MB per minute, so you will need a lot of hard drive space. It's an annoyingly slow process, but once the tracks are in .wav they are completely unencumbered. Then open the track in Audacity. The easiest thing to do is to highlight each chunk of the track (Hold down the Shift key) and then Export selection as .wav.

Be VERY careful. If you imported the tracks with a version of SonicStage before 3.4--even if you now have 3.4--the tracks are marked as imported and may well be deleted if you try to import them again. Don't try to import them again if you were using an older SonicStage. This was one of Sony's stupidest and most evil moves, but they have not revoked its effects in later versions of SonicStage.

I'd love to help you but I live in New York City and will be in and out of town all week. How about contacting Minidisc Canada? They seem to be in Montreal. And they have an RH1 in stock. Maybe they could help you out. http://www.minidisc-canada.com Phone: 514-780-1292 Fax: 514-735-5956

The suction cup is way too old-school, but Radio Shack does have a number of gizmos that connect directly to a telephone. One, for wired phones, simply goes between the curly cord to the headset and the base unit. They also have things that work with cordless phones. $20-$25 Once you have the recording, good old free Audacity has lots of filters and effects you can try.

Wait a minute--I don't understand this. Shouldn't mp3 files be just plain data that transfers using the HiMD as a USB drive?

I don't see any reason to own anything other than Hi-MD units. At the moment I have an NH-700 with a failing wheel (but which works otherwise), a newish backup NH-700 and a RH-1, along with more discs than I want to think about. Someday I will upload all the legacy MD recordings with the RH1 and hope that I don't wear it out with literally hundreds of discs.

I'm sorry it didn't work out. If it were me, I'd just toss that bad disc--or at least mark it so you don't use it ever again for something crucial. Losing another important recording would be just too painful.

Regular 3.5mm minijack. You can monitor through the headphone jack while recording--you just can't do anything about it while recording. But you can hear through the headphone jack while adjusting the Line-in Volume before you start recording. I tried it with the CD player at full volume--headphone out to line-in. With Line-in Volume about halfway up, it's possible to record without distortion. The T30 already is UMS. The conversion is for the other units, the IFP units. What encoder? Or, more important, what resolution on the ADConverter? No idea. It's in the firmware, and recording has three settings: Low, Medium and High fidelity, no numbers attached. (Though the kbps would show on playback.) Don't think about LAME. The whole thing is the size of a fat triangular thumb with firmware small enough to leave nearly 1GB on the unit. It's not user programmable, and it's not running Windows or a Mac OS.

Actually, maybe the T30 is what you want. It's eBay time. Checking out the iRiver forums at www.misticriver.net , it seems my memory got scrambled. It was the IFP-7xx series that lost its higher bitrates through a firmware upgrade. I have both an IFP-795 that I was careful not to upgrade and a T30. Just made a line-in recording from a CD onto the T30, which I'm sending to you as a PM. It is 320 kbps. Playback on the T30 from the headphone jack isn't the greatest sound quality. Of course that doesn't matter since you're transferring the recordings elsewhere. There's no level metering and no on-the-fly level control--you set line-in level before you start recording. The iRiver interface is very peculiar--lots of menus within menus--partly because the display is so small. But it sounds a lot better than the concert recordings I tried with it. Track marks, on-unit editing, etc.--nope. You can look at www.rockbox.org for very detailed information on other units, but you'll find no joy. Actually, I just looked. Here's the list: * Apple: 1st through 5.5th generation iPod, iPod Mini and 1st generation iPod Nano (not the Shuffle, 2nd/3rd gen Nano, Classic or Touch) * Archos: Jukebox 5000, 6000, Studio, Recorder, FM Recorder, Recorder V2 and Ondio * Cowon: iAudio X5, X5V, X5L, M5 and M5L * iriver: H100, H300 and H10 series * SanDisk: Sansa c200, e200 and e200R series (not the v2 models) * Toshiba: Gigabeat X and F series (not the S series) Those are not the cheap tiny units you are envisioning, but mostly big hard-drive units. The Sansa, which are fairly cheap and tiny, don't have a line-in jack (and their built-in mic recording is just awful). Ipods need an external gizmo for an input. Rockbox or not, the hardware makes the big difference. Software can't put a line-in jack into a unit that doesn't have one.

Blank media--probably reselling Sony discs--and generic FM transmitters don't get me too excited.

Your almost-dream device was the now discontinued iRiver T30, which had a line input. Not .wav recording but .mp3 at up to 320 kbps. They're still around at about your $40 price for the red 1GB units--which is way down from the original price. But the firmware updates took mp3 recording down to 96 kbps maximum, so you need to find one with un-updated firmware. Try eBay. Was it because the processor couldn't handle it? Or was there a vast conspiracy to disallow high-quality recording? The successor unit, the iRiver T60, doesn't have a line-in. Of course, you could spend $200 on the iRiver F700. http://www.mobilewhack.com/iriver-f700-4gb...ording-edition/ Or you could get a Samson Zoom H2. Or, if you don't mind an old unit with a rechargeable battery that eventually wears out and needs soldering to replace, there's the iRiver H120 / H140 (20/40 GB hard drive recorder), which has optical in and out, or the Cowon iAudio X5 (20, 30 or 60 GB), which is FLAC-friendly. Also around $200 on eBay. I would guess that one reason .wav recording wasn't put on little flash recorders was that 1GB only holds 90 mins of recording, and that's if there's nothing else on it. People who had loaded them up with mp3s wouldn't have enough room for a serious recording.

Just "Import" them. The problem is you are converting an already compressed file. So there are two stages of compression, and artifacts are likely to be introduced.

The two affordable serious recorders are the Samson Zoom H2 and the Edirol R09. Their built-in mic preamps are said to be not as good as minidisc for straight-in mic recording, but for line-in recording that obviously makes no difference, and they both do higher-resolution .wav recording than minidisc. Things like track marking and on-unit editing are more limited than MD. At a higher price point is the Sony PCM D50.

This suggests that something was wrong in the existing SonicStage installation. The first thing you should do is run File Conversion Tool on My Library, with Add Copy Protection UN-checked, and then make a safe copy of whatever folder holds My Library on CD, DVD, external hard drive, etc. Then you will have un-encrypted .oma files that any SonicStage can play. And then, once you are absolutely sure you have your library out of Sonic Stage's encrypted little clutches--preferably by playing a file or two from your backup on SonicStage on another computer--I would uninstall 4.3 completely (through Add/Remove Programs) and install it fresh from either Sony's web installer or the full installer from the link above. Maybe a reinstall would get along better with your computer.

You're not missing something--the music business is. You can find lots of illegal files free online, but unfortunately I can't tell you how in this public forum. Do some creative Googling. In the meantime, contact the vendors who sold you the DRM files. They must have some kind of contact mechanism. Tell them that since you're playing by the rules, you'd like to be able to use what you paid for, or you expect a full refund.

The only version of SonicStage compatible with Vista is 4.3. Installing it should give you the drivers. http://forums.minidisc.org/index.php?showtopic=18671