A440

Or look in Downloads here (above) for SonicStage 3.2 .

You should Google microphone and windscreen (or "wind screen" with a space) for the UK. Also, try a company called Windtech that manufactures them and see what turns up. I can recommend a place in New York City-- Professional Sound Services 311 West 43d Street Suite 1100 New York, NY 10036 212-586-1033 --but I doubt they ship overseas. You'll probably have to find a pro-sound store. Be sure to measure the diameter of your microphones to get the right fit.

You can't upload from a NetMD, and even if you had a Hi-MD, you could not upload tracks recorded in the old MD formats (SP, LP2, LP4). All you can do is record in realtime--Audacity, free, is in Downloads--and either pay for WinNMD or separate the tracks yourself.

If you separate the mics too far you are going to get some weird sound mix. I'd keep them both on your eyeglasses. With one on your hat, one on your brother's hat, what happens if you both turn your heads at various times? For omni mics, stereo recording would be to point both mics forward, binaural would be to point both mics sideways (left and right) with your head in between. Unlike greenmachine, I usually split tracks during applause by pressing the track button. It's always a gamble, though--you could be missing the last reverberations at the end of the song, or you could be too late and push the button as the next song is starting up. It's really up to you.

Uh, wait a second. If you're talking about the RH710, then that has only line-in, not mic-in. You'll need an external box--battery box for loud, preamp for not so loud--to record. If you're talking about the NH700, then: go for it.

Try shutting down all unnecessary programs when you do the transfer. It's possible the "tapping" noises are the result of your system straining to do the transfer because SonicStage needs a lot of computer power and memory as it works. Get off the internet, don't play games or music, etc. when you transfer, and see if that helps. Otherwise....how much use has that unit had ?

Yeah, you're right. Looking at your pix I remembered why I found it so ergonomic--no need to search for the hold button because it was right on the menu knob, and the track button was easy to find. Did a lot of starting and stopping with it in my pocket, with no mishaps.

Ah, you have a good memory, greenmachine. I'm pretty sure the MZ-N707 doesn't have low-sensitivity either. Yet even with a low-sensitivity option, the preamp still overloads easily, necessitating an attenuator or battery box-->line-in. What I liked about the R700 was the giant jog wheel and the best setup for one-handed control.

If the point is just to get the recordings from vinyl to computer, you don't need the MD at all. Just use a recording program like Audacity (in Downloads) and record in real time into your computer via Line-in. Don't have a line-in jack on your computer? Then get a Griffin iMic or an M-Audio Transit, for line-in connection via USB. The Transit has optical in. http://www.griffintechnology.com/products/imic/ http://www.m-audio.com/products/en_us/Transit-main.html If you also want to make MD's, it's still probably quicker to record to computer and then download to MD.

Most microphone recordings need to be pre-amplified to get a strong enough signal. Your N510 doesn't have a mic jack, which includes a preamplifier. It only has line-in, with no preamplifier. That's fine for a mixer output, but not for microphone recording. If you are recording truly blasting music, then you can try plugging the mic into line-in and see if it's a strong enough signal. You can also get a battery box, which provides some power to the mics, but that will be about 50 euros. What you really need is a preamp, and that will be over 100 euros. A better choice would be to sell that MD unit and get one with a mic-in jack and built-in preamp. For a NetMD unit like the one you have, which can download songs from the PC (but not upload), look for MZ-N707. If you don't care about downloading songs to use it as a portable player, then you don't even need NetMD: get MZ-R700. Try to make sure they are in good condition--they are old models. For microphones, look for a frequency response of 20-20,000 K--not Sony mics that go 100K-17,000K. Hobbyists sell homemade ones on eBay. Or look at the pinned thread at the top of Live Recording and build one yourself.

The same file you recorded should be on your computer and played back through SonicStage. At that point it is a simple upload, not a conversion. It's very possible that your computer, particuarly if it's a laptop, has a mediocre sound card and that's what's lowering the quality of your playback. As suggested above, use SonicStage (under Tools) to Save as .wav and burn it to a CD (not ATRAC CD), and see how it sounds.

Yes, it works as an mp3 player. You can fit 10-12 albums in Hi-LP on a regular 80-minute minidisc, three times as many on a 1GB Hi-MD disc. Transferring CDs is easy with Simple Burner. Transferring mp3 files is done with SonicStage, which is a little clumsier than iTunes. Uploading also has to be done through SonicStage, but it is much improved from the days when everyone was complaining about it. SonicStage 3.2, not earlier versions, is pretty decent. It's bulkier than a standalone mp3 player. But if you want a recorder that's also a pocket-sized mp3 player, it's the way to go.

OK, lots of different questions here. It's all about the formats. Wav is big and uncompressed, full CD fidelity --about 10MB per minute. You need it for CDs that play on conventional players, and you need it to free your recordings from SonicStage's encryption (omg). So it's a good thing you've got that external HD. Flac is lossless compression, which sounds like a contradiction but somehow maintains all the information of a .wav file with fewer MB. mp3 and ogg are lossy compression: making compromises--some audible, some not--to save space. A lot of space: mp3 is about 1MB per minute. First, to get those uploaded recordings out of SonicStage's encrypted prison (ATRAC, .omg), you need to convert them to .wav. You could convert to other formats with Marcnet's HiMDRenderer--which, as we remember, beat SonicStage to the punch--but I'd go for .wav if SonicStage will convert them. One by one: Burning CDs means creating .wav files to be played by a conventional CD player. I don't know what format your uploaded recordings are, but I'm guessing Hi-SP, which is about 1/10 the size of .wav files. So hook up that external drive and when you convert with Sonic Stage, put the files on it: Go to Tools/Options/Location to save files and change it to the external drive. Do the same with Audacity under File/Options/Directories. That solves the storage problem for the next 250 GB. To save space at this step, upload the whole disc to My Library first without automatically converting, then only covert to .wav the files you need. All kinds of media players (Real, WMP, iTunes) will burn CDs. I suggest putting the files you want to burn in a folder and naming them with numbers in order, like 01-FirstTune, 02-SecondTune, etc.--so you can just highlight and burn the whole bunch. Nero is a good professional CD-burning program--you can specify gapless, normalize files, etc.--but it's not free. ---------- Backing up recordings: This is the beauty of .flac, When you have the .wav files, use dbpoweramp (from Downloads) to convert to .flac, burn to CDs, and store. Regular CD players won't play those--you'll need to play them with your computer or convert them back to .wav. ------------------ Attach an audio clip: Hi-fi probably isn't necessary for these. dbpoweramp again: convert them to mp3, which just about everyone can play. I think you have to download the Lame mp3 encoder separately, but dbpoweramp has instructions for that. Go into dbpoweramp and set the bitrate for mp3 conversion to at least 192. For the best fidelity (and larger file sizes), use alt-preset-extreme. The higher the bitrate, the bigger the file, but a song should only be about 1MB per minute. ogg is an open-source alternative to mp3. Some people say its way of compressing sound turns out more musical than mp3. But just about everyone has mp3 playback, and doesn't want to be bothered with installing ogg. ------------- Mixing snippets: You're talking about cross-fading, and Audacity does have cross-fading under Effects. The geeky thing about Audacity is that it does all its editing in its own format--- .aup ---and then you have to export it as .wav . Sound editors you have to pay for work directly on the .wav or .mp3 files. I have one--Adobe Audition--and I end up using Audacity anyway because it's a lot less cluttered with pro-studio options I don't need. It shouldn't matter as long as you have HD space, which you will with the external drive. -------------- What format does quietamerican want? I suspect .wav . --------- For the MDCF gallery, it does take a while to upload a file. Convert your uploaded recording (with SonicStage) to .wav, convert (with dbpoweramp) to mp3. A 5-minute song in mp3 is about 5 MB, and it takes some patience. But it's just a big attachment. ------------ Not swamp your computer: make the external drive is your storage place. And just be rigorous about deleting the duplicates after you've burned things. ---------- What to save? Put the .wav file on a CD. And then, if you're truly paranoid, leave the .omg, which is considerably smaller, in My Library. You can always convert it again to wav. But you don't need to keep both .wav and .omg on your computer. The .wav won't sound any better than the original upload--but unlike mp3, it won't sound any worse.

I hope you are recording in Hi-LP or Hi-SP, not PCM. Next time, upload those files to SonicStage and then, instead of converting them to wav, use HiMDRenderer (from Downloads) to convert them to mp3 files. With the wav files you have, use dbpoweramp (also in Downloads) to convert them to mp3s. They will easily be small enough to fit on CDs.

The RH-10 is capable of recording CD-quality audio (PCM). With decent mics and levels set correctly you can record a very good facsimile of what you heard at the concert. It will not be a studio recording. It will not be a clean soundboard recording. It will be the actual sound of a live show, with conversation, noise, etc. But it will be high-fidelity. Good microphones + good placement = good recordings. Listen to some of them in the Live Recordings tab above. And check this thread: http://forums.minidisc.org/index.php?showtopic=9045

http://forums.minidisc.org/index.php?showtopic=7070 Windows Media Player does not connect to any MD. You can play back recordings in your computer with Windows Media Player if you have either uploaded them through SonicStage (Hi-MD) or recorded them in real time (NetMD or regular MD) using a program like Audacity.

Have you tried the MDCF full offline installer from Downloads? Download it, disconnect from Internet, turn off your antivirus and try it. Don't forget to put your antivirus back on before going online.

Your mp3s are not very good to start with. A song that has been compressed to 128kbps has already lost a lot of information. Then you are compressing it again to ATRAC, so you are losing even more information. Each time you compress again the sound gets worse. To have the MD sound exactly like your mp3s, you would need to transfer them as PCM files. That would not compress them any more. But then you need a 1GB disc to hold just one album. You need to start with better quality tracks. If you or your friends have the Pink Floyd or Led Zep CDs, use Simple Burner to transfer them directly to the MD. That way you skip turning them into mp3s first.

I like this skin quite a bit. The Halloween skin has that harsh orange that makes it almost unreadable. And while I'm on broadband, low bandwidth is still a good thing for the text--the faster it loads, the better.

You could do it with two adapters. First a stereo-to-mono adapter--a stereo plug to a mono jack that would combine both channels. Then you would add a mono-to-stereo adapter--a mono jack to a stereo plug--so that your mono signal would be fed to both channels. The stereo-to-mono adapter should be a cord if you can find one to minimize the stress on your headphone jack. Two adapter plugs together would put a lot of leverage pressure on your jack. The other question is how much quality you would lose, and the only way to find out is to try. Adapters are only about $3 each, so it's worth an experiment. Try a Radio Shack or other electronics store.

Try some simple things first. Change the battery to one you know is new. Or use AC power. Make sure you are connected directly to the computer rather than through a multiple-USB hub. SonicStage doesn't like to share a connection. You should install Simple Burner (get it from Downloads) and try placing a CD in your computer and having Simple Burner transfer the songs. If that transfers easily, then the problem is with your other song files. Check the songs you are trying to transfer. Are they variable bitrate (VBR) mp3s? Are they low-bitrate mp3s, like 48 kbps? Either one can give the MD trouble. The unit you got is an old model, so there is also a possibility that it has been heavily used and worn out. Do you have any MDs recorded that you can play back on the unit, just to make sure it's working?

All of the MD recorders have the same inputs--stereo miniplug mic-in, stereo miniplug line-in (analog), or optical line-in (digital). The Mackie probably has line-out, and if it was going into a cassette recorder then it should do the same with an MD. http://forums.minidisc.org/index.php?showtopic=7989 If you want to upload to a computer, rather than stacking up minidiscs, then get a Hi-MD--any model without a D in the number (MZ-NH700, MZ-NHF800, MZ-NH900, MZ-RH910, MZ-RH10). Use the analog line-in rather than the optical to record. http://www.minidisc.org/part_Hi-MD_Sony.html For all the complaining here about minidisc, you will find it a great improvement over analog cassettes.

If you are installing from Sony's online installer, try using the MDCF installer in Downloads instead. Disconnect from the internet and turn off any firewall or security programs before you do it. Don't forget to turn them on again afterward.

For compatibility reasons. He might want to play back those lectures on a computer or CD player without SonicStage or ATRAC. Might as well record them initially in Hi-LP--it would be good enough for a voice recording.

I've had this problem with a disc skip. Sometimes SonicStage will be able to play back the tracks even if the unit itself cannot--you say you can still see the timings. Try connecting the USB and using SonicStage to play them (not upload, just play), then record them through the soundcard. You might have to make the choice between recording and dancing at future club dates.