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highlandsun

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Everything posted by highlandsun

  1. Yeah, I didn't know what to do with the free mic either since I always use my SP binaurals anyway. But I guess I can hand it off when I loan my other recorders out to friends now, got an MZR50, MZR70, MZN10, MZNH1 all idling now. (Well I sometimes bring the MZN10 to gigs to play my break music, recording gigs with the RH1 now. Used to record gigs with the NH1.)
  2. I just noticed, uploading an old SP track without a title, SonicStage sets the title of the transferred track to the current date and time, not the date and time the track was actually recorded. (And yes, all of my MDs have recorded datestamps...) Stupid. Nor does it display the recorded stamp, so it looks like I'll have to use something else to display that info and set the track titles before transferring. Amazing how they can come so far and yet still be so stupid.
  3. I just received my MZRH1 that I pre-ordered from Sound Professionals in May. It's black. They actually shipped last Monday, arrived Friday but I was out of town so UPS delivered it today. The first thing I did after opening all of the packaging was to plug in the USB cable hook it up to my laptop. The OLED display came on, and Windows recognized it as a NetMD device. Then I inserted an old MD (recorded in 1999, SP) and started up SonicStage 4 and transferred a track from the MD to the laptop. Yay... I have a "dumb" USB power supply here but it looks like the RH1 won't charge from it. It charges OK from the laptop, and there's also a Sony power brick (with a USB plug output) which I haven't tested yet, but if a dumb power supply doesn't work, that makes me wonder why they would bother to put smarts into their power brick. Oh well.
  4. Agreed. I'll probably buy an RH1 so I can conveniently upload all my old SP recordings. But I'm going to still resent the fact that it's lagging their other players (since Sony is now supporting AAC). They should have supported FLAC too; that would be the best quality/capacity compromise for a portable.
  5. Interesting. I have a feeling that a little TOC editing with an MD-Data drive would fix that.
  6. I would probably buy a new deck to replace my JB920, but then again, I might just plug my PC into my stereo. (Actually, I have that all connected already.) The deck is certainly more convenient though, power, insert disc, hit play. With the PC I have to fuss around more before the sound starts playing. For the car, I have a JVC deck with a single slot for both CDs and MDs, and a 12-disc CD changer. I would only buy a new deck if it offered HiMD without losing any other features that I already have. The single slot/single-DIN form factor is most important, because I don't have space for a double-DIN unit or two separate single-DIN units for CD and MDs. If they can't provide that, then I'll just keep plugging my NH1 into the JVC's Aux input. The other two must-have features are full CD-Text display for CDs (or more plainly, full text display for all inputs, CD, MD, radio, changer), and speed-sensitive volume control. And of course, JVC makes the world's smallest 12-disc changers, the new changer would have to fit where my current one fits.
  7. Kind of a tough call, but I voted for the price drop. I've got hundreds of SP discs of live music that I haven't listened to in years. In some sense I don't miss it, but it would be nice to get it online. Just not an urgent priority any more...
  8. This is what they should have released instead of the DCM-MDM1 years ago. MD capacity was way too inadequate for video, but as a still camera it would have done very well. And if they had released it back then, it might have sold well enough to justify further refinement, so that today it would be the tiny size one would expect...
  9. Yeah, I tend to agree. HiMD would have to come up at least one order of magnitude in actual read/write speed to really win. The fact that MD is faster than floppies is pretty much irrelevant today - just about every thing you would have needed floppies for is done with USB flash drives now, and they're only a couple inches in size. Definitely more convenient when you just need to move a few files from one box to another. The only things MD has going for it are the reasonably compact form factor, random access read/write, and data longevity. The things it has against it are slow speed, insufficient density (compared to other options available today) and idiotic proprietary data formats. But really, the biggest thing MD has going against it today is that it is a Sony product. Until the balance of power in Sony leadership shifts back to Sony Electronics, away from Sony Music/Entertainment, they might as well forget about being a consumer electronics company. Certainly I've stopped thinking of them as such.
  10. Yeah, I'd be happy with a JB980-equivalent to replace my JB920. USB, etc...
  11. No, all the multitrack MD recorders use the same format. All MD hardware uses a compatible UTOC. There were some differences for MD-Data discs, they were supposedly built to tighter tolerances, but nothing else. I've used my MDH-10 data drive to examine all of these discs, so I know. And yes, I have a Sony MDM-X4 4-track MD recorder too.
  12. I just played a track from my MDS-JB920 and recorded it optically on my MZ-NH1, and it uploaded fine using SonicStage 2.2. Of course the track was originally recorded live (analog) on my MZ-R50, so it shouldn't have had any SCMS protection in the first place.
  13. Hmmm, I've never tried that. Will give it a shot. I wonder if SCMS will make a difference.
  14. Hm... You could write a new filter that just provides a clock reference. I wrote one of those, based on sample code in the DirectX SDK, it's a pretty small amount of code.
  15. All the multitrack recorders were orphaned years ago. There are no drive upgrades.
  16. I'll give it a try. I just used 0.10 to convert a bunch of my band gig recordings; on one of the tracks that opens with harp solo, I got lots and lots of repeats. I re-ran that track using a 45 second block size instead of the default 30 and it came out much cleaner. So far that's all I've noticed.
  17. MD-Data in Multitrack recorders just uses standard MD audio format, but with multiple tracks. Since Hi-MD doesn't support upload of standard MD data, there's nothing to do here.
  18. What exactly do you mean by trashing tracks? So far the only problem I've had is that it refused to transfer one of my tracks. It went thru the whole process but at the end there was no file saved in my music library. Very annoying. I got the track in realtime/digital by just playing the track off the HiMD using SonicStage and directing the output thru a Virtual Audio Cable and recording it in Audacity.
  19. Oh, you gotta love this: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/...tid=141&tid=123 Ah yes, the same industry association that has already been found guilty of price fixing is complaining that consumers aren't paying their illegally high prices. Yah, right.....
  20. Yes it's possible, with varying degrees of difficulty. When you look at consumer DVD players that also play audio CDs, some companies use two separate lasers for the purpose, some do it all with one. Doing it all with one is a big compromise, and you're betting that your software/error corection codes can make up the difference.
  21. What is the actual question you're asking? It's clear that USB1.1 at 12Mbps already exceeds the 9.8Mbps that the medium is capable of, so there's nothing to be gained by using any faster interface, like USB2.0. If you're asking where Sony gets their "100X" claims from, obviously it's pure marketing BS because actual transfer speeds in real life are always slower. As for software-limited speeds... Let's see, doing the math at 48kbps I guess you would expect to be able to transfer at 200x, is that the point? Of course, this assumes 100% efficient use of the USB bus, which will never happen, because USB is inherently inefficient. There are turnaround delays for commands and data to go back and forth from the PC to the device. And even in "bulk streaming mode" you can't stream more than XX Kbytes without waiting for an ACK (I think the limit is 64K, it is most likely smaller on most portable devices.) At 48kbps, 100X represents 50% efficiency, which isn't great, but isn't surprising either given how lousy the USB1.1 design is.
  22. S/PDIF can transfer the title info, but Sony never made any hardware that does this. Yet another stupidity on their part.
  23. And we should care about this, why? When one widget maker can sell a product cheaper than another widget maker, we called that "competition." When one music vendor sells music cheaper than the established industry, they call that "piracy." I'm sure this kind of verbal nonsense is making real pirates sick. Let's see, the "pirates" sold 1 billion discs and made $4.5billion. Usually things you buy on the black market are MORE expensive than the legit counterparts, but here the items are LESS. Why is that? Could it be that the REAL VALUE of the product is actually nearer to ZERO? Who are the real criminals here, the people charging $4.50 per CD, or the people charging $25.00?
  24. It all depends on the complexity of the incoming signal. You can create a bitstream that will compress and decompress perfectly, if you tailor it to the characteristics of the codec. Of course, I've only done this with synthesized music consisting of a small number of pure tones. Doing it for real vocals or analog instruments would be a real pain...
  25. ATRAC and ATRAC3 aren't so terrible, they're just designed with a different philosophy than those other codecs. ATRAC is constant bitrate, those other codecs are variable. That difference alone puts them in two completely different worlds. It's really easy to sync MD recordings to video and other audio sources and interleave them into new multimedia streams. It's notoriously difficult to do this with any VBR format. Nobody seems to complain that their DVD movies sound like shit, and Dolby AC3 is a constant rate 384kbps carrying 5.1 channels of audio. Sony licensed the basics of ATRAC from Dolby. I think they chose wisely. (Gee, 6 channels at 64kbps each = 384kbps. So who says that 64kbps ATRAC has to sound bad?)
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