MDfreak

I opened the wav's with Adobe Audition (successor of CoolEdit) & Winamp and both play the waves without any hessitation. Tested the program with 7 different files now (30 minutes) and I still didn't find any bugs here. Tested tracks from CD's via analog in: - Meatloaf - I'll do anything for love (1994) - Mr. Big - Wild World (1994) - Phil Collins - Both sides of the story (1994) - Svenson & Gielen - the beauty of silence (2003) and 3 bad quality recordings. I uploaded the following track for analysis: Source Track: Mr. Big - Wild World Source CD: Greatest Hits '94, volume 1 Editting steps: - importing via SonicStage 2.1 in LP2 quality to library - recording via SonicStage 2.1 in LP2 quality to MD-disc (NetMD) - playing disc in MZ-N10 & recording it analog with NH700 - uploading track via SonicStage 2.1 - exporting track to wav with HIMDRENDER.EXE - opening track with Adobe Audition 1.5 - saving wave-file as 192 kbps mp3 (Fraunhofer codec) with Adobe Audition. AND STILL QUITE NICE QUALITY (although ripping the file directly to Hi-SP sounds better :grin: !) download: http://www.mdcenter.nl/special/mrbig.oma.mp3

I tested it on 2 tracks that I know pretty well with a lot of speach so errors in timing would be very obvious (recorded analog from CD) The timing seems allright (maybe not exact, but no obvious mistakes). I have to do further testing to find out if it works PERFECT! Neat work untill now! Some background info about used equipment: - MZ-NH700 - P IV 2,8 GHz with 1 GB memory - SonicStage 2.1 - WinXP Pro SP1 - 2 music-tracks of about 3,5 minutes each

Nice of you to have things working for more than 1 minute (only with some timing-errors). But maybe I have one suggestion. Maybe you do not want to think in terms of minutes and seconds because a wave-form is made up out of samples. In case of a standard wave file for CD-audio you have a sample-frequency of 44,100 samples/sec so one sample takes 22.67573696 microsecond (so an accuracy of nano-seconds is not very usefull, it is much to exact). Also the time I get in my exportsample is not exactly 1 minute, but something of 1:01 minute (one export was 1:01:20, another 1:01:617) Furthermore when you jump into a coded audio-sample you have to take in account that for coding time-dependancies are used to filter out redundant information. So jumping random into an coded audio-file gives inaccuracies in decoding the first few samples (a good decoder may take some samples from before the starttime to get a good decoded signal immediately) so searching for the exact bits that are double in overlapping sound may be not possible because of the inaccuracies in the beginning of the decoding.

Yes, I read later. Sadly I do not have the knowledge to take part in the developement. I only have a Hi-MD (NH700) and a 4 minute uploaded Hi-SP track to test proposed solutions.

So now Sony has no reason why not to include a export-function in SonicStage itself. Exporting is already possible for the people who realy want it! Real NICE FIND! Maybe now someone can write an export-program that does this trick automatic (open oma-file, say where you want the wave-file, and a "convert" button). O, by the way (I hope you don't mind) I put a Dutch translation of the procedure on our Dutch forum. Off course with a reference to this topic. http://www.mdcenter.nl/forums/viewtopic.php?t=779 If you have a problem with the translation please let me know, then I remove it but I think everbody should know of this neet trick! Many thanks on behalf of the Dutch MiniDisc-community!

Not very suprising, but strange that Sony NL checked with Sony Japan technitians about this topic and that they said that it does not work. I think they didn't even bother trying it.

Although Sony said to us that Hi-MD is not compatible with MAC (also not the data-storage) I tried it today. And YES, it works! I tested it with a Powerbook G4 with Mac OS X 10.3. The Hi-MD is recognised as an external storage medium of 1 GB (off course with the 1G disc). Reading data is no problem. Writing data also no problem. And after reattaching the Hi-MD to a Windows PC the data that I wrote to the disc via MAC is also readable! For the music-part of Hi-MD a MAC-version of SonicStage will be needed. Sadly that is not available. This proofs to me that Hi-MD data-storage is compatible with MAC although Sony claimed the opposite.

It is a little difficult to say what I like and what I like not because what I like maybe you don't like. We already gave our findings to the MDCP and you can find them here: http://www.minidisc.org/himd_mdcenter_news.html There is also a part about the NH1 itself.

Thanks a lot! Bye the way, early June we get a demo-Hi-MD that we can use until we can buy our own Hi-MD of choise. This may be an ideal opportunity to test everything we want to know!

The frequent MDCF-visitors know that MDcenter.nl had a test-session of the NH1 @ Sony Netherlands (early march). That's why I know it works that way.

Maybe not the 3-line version, but the version of the NH900 and so on works on practical every unit with remote jack and is sold by e.g. minidisco.com I tested the 3-line remote of the NH1 on my N10 and then only 1 line of the 3-lines is used (and 1 gives the tracknumber because there is no separate space to display it).

I think that the only possibility to prove Sony wrong is to try out ourselves when Hi-MD is available in shops. I also found it strange because the USB mass-storage standard is also used on MAC's but I explicitly asked Sony and this was their answer. I can't help it. We didn't have a MAC-computer with us when we were @ Sony's

I had contact with Sony Netherlands and they checked on the MAC-compatibility with Sony Japan and the answer was that the data-mode also will NOT work with MAC's. A bit strange because it is USB-mass-storage compatible but that is what Sony told us.