highlandsun

This whole HiMD campaign has just been a series of lies on top of lies. They said HiMD would be released first in the US (not that we believed them) and surprise surprise, the flagship units have appeared first in Japan, as usual. Idiotic. Well, I've given Sony tens of thousands of my hard-earned dollars thru the years, in three XBR TVs, laptop computers, stereo receivers, and all my MD gear. I think I've bought my last Sony though; my next laptop is not going to be a VAIO. My next TV probably won't be a Trinitron. Screw 'em. To the other question - removable media is still king for portable recording. I go to music festivals and record 6-12 hours of music/day for a solid week. If I was using an HD solution, the thing would fill up in a day or two and I'd need to have a computer with me to offload and make room for more music. With a removable disc, I just pop in a new disc and keep going. I can leave the computer at home and do all my editing there, without distraction.

The MZ-N10 only uses one battery at a time, and the battery level indicator only shows the state of the currently selected battery. So if you attach the external battery the battery gauge may or may not change, depending on whether the N10 decides to switch to the external, or continues to use the internal.

I didn't see it mentioned anywhere else, but the MZNH1 is now available on the US SonyStyle web site. I guess that means it should be in stock at other places as well.

Right, the Blu-Ray forum is talking about blue-laser optical media. It's possible to have a reasonably compact double-sided mechanism, I've seen plenty of ultra-slim laptop floppy drives. (3-1/2" double sided media, remember?) So the idea isn't too far-fetched. But I just saw an NH600 at the local electronics shop, and I was disgusted at how bulky it is. Especially compared to my MZN10. I think Sony has some work to do still re: developing and miniaturizing this HiMD technology...

Oh well. I unfortunately don't have a NetMD deck otherwise I'd try this again. My deck is a JB920, it only handles original ATRAC. By the way, it's possible to artificially construct WAV files that will compress and decompress losslessly with ATRAC(3), if you make sure that (a) there's not much complexity to begin with and ( the frequencies present in the file all fall directly in the center of the codec's subbands, and their amplitudes are geometrically related (to allow the floating quantizer to work). I suppose the same should be possible for MP3 as well. It would be interesting to see how portable such a data stream would be, between revision levels of a codec, etc...

I've used the Win95 drivers on Win98. You can't leave them installed though; Win98 fails to boot if the drivers are present at boot time. But you can move the drivers into the System directory after Windows is up and running, and they'll work. I haven't tried with Win2K or WinXP, pretty sure the driver architecture is too different.

I have one but I'm still using it until I get an NH1.

I'm not sure what your point about CF is; what is the difference between buying "high grade CF" vs MemoryStick Pro? At least high grade CF provides a speedup in all CF hardware; MemoryStick Pro only provides a speedup in Pro-compatible hardware. Otherwise it operates at the same slow speed as normal MemorySticks.

Yeah, just what the world needed, yet another form factor of Flash memory. Bleah. MemoryStick is bogus, I hope it dies and Sony puts CompactFlash on more of their products in the future.

It would be useful to have more info on how the ATRAC3 samples were produced. I can't download any of the Sample packages, they seem to have already been removed. I'd guess the best way to obtain the ATRAC3 samples would be to feed the audio via optical to a NetMD deck, and capture it again using optical from the deck. I would certainly NOT use the ATRAC3 codec that I provided for MiniDisc.org; that was ripped out of a pre-release version of the Sony tools and it's known to fail in a number of common conditions.

I have a combo CD/MD head unit (JVC KDMX3000) and the JVC 12-disc CD changer. Too bad JVC hasn't kept up with this product family and introduced an MDLP version of it yet. Of course it has an AUX IN and I hook my MZN10 up to that when I want to listen to MDLP tracks in the car. This is less satisfying of course, since I don't get to see the track titles going this route. The JVC had almost the perfect feature set at the time, except that it only supported CD-Text in the changer, not in the in-dash CD slot. (Very stupid.) So my must-have list for a new head unit would be: Single-DIN unit, both CD and Hi-MD support Full CD-Text support (in the head unit, not just in the changer) aux input Expansion bus (in case I want both an MD changer and a CD changer later on) engine speed-sensitive volume (JVC called this Audio Cruise Mode but it doesn't appear to be in their current products any more)

Date/Time stamping is one of my must-have features. Since I'm so lazy about writing labels and titling tracks, it's the only way for me to know where something I recorded is from...

Yah, I knew what they meant, but I liked my interpretation better.... These HiMD units better not be delayed. Looks like my MZN10 has dropped a few times too many, and it has a hard time locking onto tracks now; sometimes it starts right away but lots of times it takes minutes before it can find the beginning of a track.

Where's the etronics.com waiting list? I thought this was cute on their web site, check out the MZR501 with "Sampling Rage Converter" !!! http://www.etronics.com/listproducts.asp?c...tid=4353&store= What does it do, transform songs you hate into songs you like?

Hi there, just wanted to mention that the current Win NMD program doesn't work with the new libraries in SonicStage 2.0. Have you tried using SS2.0 yet, any plans to support it? (Or maybe it's supposed to work, and I just have a hosed install?)

Seems like a lot of bother. Load the DVD into your PC, run smartripper and pull the audio tracks directly...

There is already an ATRAC3 ACM codec for Windows. But you still need the decryption/encryption functionality to be able to read/write OMG files.

Hm... I installed SonicStage 2.0 on my VAIO laptop, so maybe my findings are invalid. But, I see that Windows Media Player is able to play OMG files, and also allows burning them to CD. For anyone who'se familiar with the DirectX SDK and the GraphEdit program, I should point out that OpenMG comes with a DirectShow filter that takes OMG files as input and spits out audio as output. But (so far) it only works if the output is the Default DirectSound device, it crashes if you try to dump it with the Dump filter or write it with the WAV Dest filter. I'm pretty sure this filter is what WMP uses; other programs that use DirectX for audio support will probably also work. WinAMP 5 doesn't.

I've had erratic results with Goldwave, it drops samples when recording from USB. I haven't found a lot of really good alternatives. The current version of WinNMD works well for me now to record straight from my MZN10, previous versions had bugs with their track timing.

The problem with most PC's built-in audio ports is that they generally have poor isolation and so pick up a lot of noise from the power supplies and everything else going on. On my PCs I can often hear buzzing whenever full-screen scrolling occurs, just for an example. So the main reason to use one of these USB devices even with analog signals, is the hope that the external device's A-D/D-A codec is better isolated than what's already in your PC. So the point isn't that the PC's analog input is necessarily bad at digitizing a signal, it's just that what you're digitizing is more than the music you wanted to record...

There are some nice options on Minidisco's web site too http://www.minidisco.com/computer-audio.html The M-Audio Transit looks very nice, with 24-bit/96khz support.

I know of the Roland UA30 (which apparently is poorly supported), the EgoSys U2A (which my brother owns, and apparently works very very well). Doing a google search for "USB optical audio digital" will turn up some other candidates. If all you need are digital IOs there's also the Edirol UA-1D. I think if I were doing this all over I would buy the EgoSys U2A, since it has a complete set of analog *and* digital inputs and outputs. It really does it all. But from a purely practical standpoint, I only need digital audio I/O; I can use my MDS-JB920 in pass-thru mode if I want to record an analog source.

Maybe. It's possible that the source disc is copy-protected. You'll need an SCMS copy-bit killer to fix that. Or a PC with a soundcard that has optical I/O, generally sound cards ignore the SCMS bits. If the source disc is a DVD, you have to make sure the DVD player's optical output is set for a stereo PCM stream. Normally it defaults to Dolby AC3, which won't make much sense to an MD recorder.

The raw data transfer rate for HiMD is just under 10Mbps, USB 1.1 has a bandwidth of 12Mbps. I suspect that HiMD will operate at about the same speed as any other USB 1.1 CD/DVD/HD drive. Not amazingly fast, but usable, and definitely better than floppies. Of course, the notion of floppy disks themselves is pretty ridiculous today. My current laptop has a 40GB internal hard drive, and I'll be looking for a 60 or 80G drive soon. The idea of backing up my hard drive to floppy disks is ... ludicrous. Backing up to 1G HiMD isn't that much more appealing; backing up to 40 individual disks is about as bad as backing up to floppies in the late 1980s. I think HiMD is useful on a laptop, the same way my Compact Flash/PCMCIA card is useful - for quickly moving files around from laptop to laptop - but not as a primary storage medium. Still too small and too slow for that.