doclloyd

For those interested and not on minidisco.com's mailing list, they are running a father's day special with discounts up to $20 off on orders of $200 or more. I just saved $20 on pre-ordering the NH900. Use the code "MYFATHER" during the order process. Make sure to hit the "apply" button on that page to use the coupon. Brought my total order to $267.54 with shipping ($259.95 after coupon, pre-shipping total). Any way to save money, right? Hope this helps people out there. DO NOTE: This only lasts thru JUNE 20TH. So, if you've been on the fence for pre-ordering, now's the chance to save a few bucks. :-) Oh, and of course minidisco does not charge your card until the item ships...

According to minidisc.org, it looks like you can send LP2 files to a disc formatted for Hi-MD. According to this link, http://www.minidisc.org/hi-md_faq.html#_q93, you could get almost 5 hours of LP2 music on an Hi-MD disc. That's something that's quite tempting to me... not having to re-encode a lot of music just to be compatible with Hi-MD and not NetMD isn't appealing yet.

I'm able to burn to CD using Sony's "beta" version of SS2. Their "standard" edition, of course, does not allow the normal audio CD burning.

Looks like they're doing the "pre-order" thing too. Still need to wait until at least 7/15. Doh... but the fact that Sony is doing the pre-order thing is nice, I guess.

I'm sure I don't have the greatest speakers for this system, but I picked up a pair of Sony bookshelf speakers for this same stereo - price was $50 or so. Having it in a bedroom sorta limits the size of speakers you need/want to get. If your budget is <= $200 for speakers alone, I'd have to imagine you could find a decent pair for your needs. Good luck.

If you really need Hi-MD discs, Sony is selling them on their website now. Get the three pack here: http://www.sonystyle.com/is-bin/INTERSHOP....2f3KIT&Dept=acc

Hello, I just recently purchased a mic for my MD (the one listed in the subject, found here.. http://www.minidisco.com/sp-spsm1.html). I've only played with recording quickly here at the office and noticed a little bit of motor noise being recorded through the mic. I'm using a N10 portable. Are there any tips for reducing this noise? Get an extension to keep the mic further away from the portable itself? Reducing sensitivity? Tips are welcome and appreciated.

Perhaps I spoke too soon, but I'm not sure. I turned the internal battery off and messed around with the head inside the unit.. stuck my finger in there and nudged it a tiny bit. Did that and now I can record almost to the end of the disc again. Very strange. I'll have to be careful with it I guess. I'll keep you all posted if it gets better or worse.

I'm hoping someone can help me out here... hope this is the right forum. Recently, I've noticed that when I'm transferring music to a MD using my N10, when I near the end of the disc and its capacity, the portable starts going into this loop that it can't get itself out of. Everything's fine up until a certain point. Using LP2, I'd say it's around the 145-150 minute mark that it starts acting up. It seems to happen with multiple discs as well.... I thought cleaning the head with a MD head cleaner might do the trick. Nope. I tried searching for updated NetMD drivers, in case that was it. Can't find any on the Net (any pointers here?) any ideas are appreciated. This only started happening too... I hope my N10 isn't starting to die on me...

crazy's right ... NetMD/MDLP will be around for a while. Sony was wise to allow people the ability to continue downloading and recording in the std-MD modes on the recorders (using std-MD media) alongside the new Hi-MD stuff. Gives people the chance to start using the new equipment with old media. It's almost equatable to CD's and DVD's... since they are readable in a DVD drive, but not the other way around. Of course the analogy is lost after Hi-MD gives a higher capacity to the original media, but I digress.

I'm definitely sitting on the fence right now... my car (Passat) has a tape/CD combo deck, for which I could get a tape adapter, but then the cables become an issue. There are one or two car decks (MDLP capable) that I could get, but then I may be left out when Hi-MD rolls around. Leland, I can only imagine the convenience (and utter coolness) of an in-dask MD player. It always seemed like a perfect fit ... small discs for carrying in your car means less CD cases filling up all those compartments...

See the following link for what modes can be recorded/transferred in Hi-MD mode. http://www.minidisc.org/hi-md_faq.html#r_q93 My understanding that SS 2.1 is also supposed to allow PCM downloading from the PC.

Hello there! First thing to do is upgrade your software to SonicStage 2.0 and Simpleburner 2.0, available here -- http://forums.minidisc.org/viewtopic.php?t=4767 (hope you have a high-speed connection) Next thing is determining how you want to handle your music. It is possible to use SimpleBurner and only copy some tracks off a CD and not the whole thing, so that may work well for you. The selection screen doesn't show up automatically. There's a button in the middle underneath the "record" button to show tracks. However, if you're looking to makes lots of compilations and such, then ripping everything within SonicStage first might be your best bet. Let us know if you need more help. Glad you're enjoying your MD!

Glad I could help. My roommate's had the N910 for almost a year and yesterday I finally show him how convenient NetMD is for transferring mp3's over, particularly long dj mixes. :-) Enjoy your music.

How are you transferring files to your device? According to Sony's site, it supports ATRAC3 (not ATRAC3plus) playback. Are you converting your mp3's using SS2.0 to ATRAC3 and then transferring to your walkman?

This question makes me wonder if Sony got slightly ahead of itself a year or so ago when it created this crazy Media PC with a NetMD drive built into it. I was so excited to read about it and actually saw one once in a Circuit City in the Chicago area. I thought the idea at the time was great. Now with Hi-MD coming in as an audio AND data storage format, it may be time to try the internal drive again. I wouldn't be surprised to see Sony just put it in their Vaio line of desktops first, then *maybe* a version for anyone to install into their computers. The only problem I could imagine stopping this is that the Hi-MD portables will already be acting as drives, so Sony may be thinking that creating an internal drive would be reinventing the wheel. I don't personally think so and it would be a shot at making Hi-MD more of a general-purpose medium alongside using it for music. Oh, the possibilities ...

Does anybody know whether or not Sony would ever intend to support (or at least have plugin capability for) importing other file types, such as OGG? My roommate just asked me because he had some music on his computer in that format and wanted to import into SS2 to transfer to MD. I haven't heard of anything like this yet, but was wondering if anybody else has.

Yes, the Connect download of SS2 will work just fine and install even if no previous SS exists. My roommate just did this tonight. It also installed some NetMD drivers that worked with his N910. No separate driver installation necessary! Perhaps it comes with basic drivers for all sorts of Sony devices. Give it a try.

Yea, that is definitely a strange issue. I haven't had any problems to date with CD's that I've directly imported, nor with mp3's that I imported to transfer to MD. The only problem I've had is re-downloading tracks purchased off of Connect (and Sony knows about the problems - and I got 10 free songs for notifying them. Back to the topic). Re-downloading apparently resets all transfer rights to 0. Nice, huH? They're working on a fix. One option, if you haven't explored it already, is to delete the tracks you imported and try it again, just for kicks. Or, if you have a relatively fresh install of SS2 and not much of a library to concern yourself with yet, a uninstall/re-install is worth a shot perhaps... but I'm not well-versed with SS2 problems. Others here may have more info than I. Good luck.

I saw this off Slashdot recently and now here... I was a bit surprised by the results, but then again, i'm not 100% confident in their testing methods. What were their methods? As self-promoting as it may be, some of the tests Sony has done at least had a lot of documentation about the process and it sounded (no pun intended) solid and hard to dismiss as them just patting themselves on the back.

How is Music Move different from the Simple Burner software that takes tracks directly from CD to MD?

It worked great! I tried out a couple of .oma files that I had downloaded from Connect and they played flawlessly! Excellent alternative to SS if you want it. Hope Sony doesn't find out too quick and gets ticked about it :-/.

One other option is to specify the bit rate when transferring to your MD, so it can be compatible. But I don't think your MZR-500 is even NetMD capable, so converting your music to Atrac3plus now should be OK for prepping for your Hi-MD days.

So far so good with using the software with a NetMD... except that I can't purchase music. Oh well... I've put in an email. We'll see how fast they actually respond. Anyone else try buying anything?

Thanks for the pointers. Since my post, I found a thread on minidisct.com (and here on these forums) about how the new SS 2.0 off of connect.com would upgrade SS 1.5 (well, effectively uninstall it during its install process.) It did exactly as you said and "upgraded" the database to work with the new software. 2.0 seems snappier overall than 1.5 on my box (Athlon 1GHz -- seems old now). I'm browsing the music store now to see if anything looks interesting. Probably one of the more exciting things about the new software is the lack of restrictions on track downloads. Now I don't need to feel so bad about putting the same track on multiple MD's for compilations. Good times. I'll post more after I use the software .. see if anything seems odd.