Devilbunny

Open up the disc and *carefully* use a Q-tip to clean the playing (bottom) surface. I bought a bunch of used discs and had to do this to a few of them.

You could try unplugging the car's battery, leaving it off for a good 15-20 minutes, then hooking the battery back up.

It will record in SP mode. Unfortunately, the source file for NetMD from SP is not the CD itself, but the ATRAC3 LP2-quality file on your hard drive. So you can record in SP, but it will only be LP2 quality, because that's the quality of the source. If you record straight from a CD player in SP, and compare that to a NetMD recording, you'll be able to tell the difference.

Most likely it's noise off your sound card. Buy a Xitel MD-Port AN-1 to record in hum-free analog or (better still) Xitel DG-2 to record in digital.

The E40 won't do LP2 or LP4. Record in SP and they'll play just fine on it. Of course, it does make NetMD a lot less useful, because you're getting LP2 quality even if you record in SP over NetMD. If you record direct from CD on the optical input in SP, you'll get high-quality discs that will play properly in the E40.

It lacks the necessary preamp. Just buy a battery box. Cheaper, easier, better.

A noisy DAC stage, perhaps, that the looped playback while recording didn't reveal? Just a guess.

See #4 here.

Pull out the optical cable and look at it. Is the light glowing? If not, there's no signal. How you fix that depends on what kind of hardware you're using to get digital out. I have the Xitel DG-2, and have found that it needs to be unplugged when starting up the computer, then plugged in before starting the MP3 player.

Assuming you'll be doing sound processing on your computer, just make a brief, loud noise at the beginning of recording, then line the sound up when you're done.

I've got an MD-Port DG2, and I've found that it's best to kill every running process before starting your mp3 player. Then start the mp3 player and don't touch the computer - at all - until it's finished recording. Be sure your screensaver is turned off. That works in Windows 98, so it should work for any Windows version.

No, the looser, it is not. You have now voiced the #1 complaint about NetMD. You'll have to record in real time using the line-in on your computer.

No, you won't be able to do that. The microphone amp is not present in the R500. And yes, you understood me correctly about what a battery box is. Your English is considerably better than that of many (perhaps most) of its native speakers.

Guest, just buy or build a battery box to make it line-level. From what I've read, that seems to be their advice even for MD's that have a mic input, if you're trying to do anything serious.

No, I didn't think you were being dismissive at all. It really does sound like a CD recorder would do exactly what you want, though another idea did come to me - you could buy a Nomad Jukebox 3 for $250 (which, as far as I can tell, is about the same as a CD-R). It's portable, useful for other things, and will record directly to .wav from a digital input (unlike, say, the Archos). I don't know much about the software beyond basic features; I don't use music editing software for any of its fancy features (the major project I've done was on Cool Edit, and it was splicing a track together at a precise point). I assume that you meant you wanted more-than-16-bit-depth for processing; I don't know if it will do that or not.