MDfreak

I don't know how reliable the info is. I also have regular contact with productmanagement but then at Sony Netherlands/Benelux and they NEVER tell you something about future developement. And if they do it is HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL so if it is true it is probably the last phonecall that person had with the people of Sony because he published it openly. What I personally think is that it concerns a personal view of someone @ Sony that he thinks MD will last about 2 years but that it is interpreted as that it is a fact Sony will stop research in 2 a 3 years. I moreover think that Sony looks at it from year to year and as long as they sell enough units they will develope new once. So if this is true and it gets back to Sony someone @ Sony will have a problem because he talked to much. Also the person who published it has had it's last conversation with Sony telling him any confidential things. Furthermore we had such rumours also before the intro of Hi-MD. Off course there will be some time in the future that there will be no more new MD's. Also nobody at Sony will officially confirm this info until the last units are produced so it will stay rumors until that moment so discussing it is a little bit useless I think.

You have got a PM!

I read the manual and indeed the European model does not have the custom settings. This makes it impossible to adapt the sound of the RH10 to the headphones you use. This makes the RH10 pretty useless when wanting to to adapt it to your own taste of sound. I hope the regional codes for the new generation appear quick otherwise I have to reconsider buying a Europan RH10 (maybe get a Japanse one).

Would that be me? Review following soon! (making an English translation of the Dutch version now).

Plugin works fine with my English SonicStage 3.0 (for US Connect site)

When importing a lot of mp3's in SonicStage 3.0 I often get a lot of separate albums with the same name and every album containing only 1 track. This happens when you have a album which contains tracks of various artists. For every different artist SonicStage creates a separate album because it thinks every album can only have 1 artist. This can be solved by setting the "compilation"-option for every album but with a couple of thousand tracks (and thus about the same number of albums) this is a huge job because you have to do the following steps for each album: - select the album an choose "properties" when you right-click on the album. - enable the "Compilation" option. - click ok and wait some seconds for SonicStage to update the Library. After doing this for about 100 tracks I've had it and searched for an other possibility and luckily I found it. I managed to change this setting for all tracks at once by doing the following: - Go to the "all tracks" view in SonicStage - Select all tracks and choose "properties" by right clicking on one of them. - Wait some time for the properties to appear. - Set the option "tracks in the compilation albums" - click ok and wait some time (in my case about a minute) for SonicStage updating the properties of all albums. Now all the tracks of one album are in the same SonicStage-album despite that some tracks in the same album have different artists. I hope more people that have this problem can solve it this way without having to do a lot of work.

"Sennheiser driven" means that the microphone-element is from the well know microphone-brand Sennheiser: www.sennheiser.de 20 - 20.000 Hz means that the microphone will pick up frequencies from 20 Hz till 20 kHz (so the whole range a normal human ear would hear).

Behind the "sliding door" at the side of the walkman where you can also connect the dry battery case or power adapter. (picture 2)

As mentioned before our visit is delayed because our contact is ill at the moment.

Nice find. I also tried it and it works perfectly. So then I decided to make some reg-files to make life easy for those who are not familiar with editing the registry. Just double-click the *.reg file of your choise and that's all! I made 4 versions (included in the zip-file): - MDCF: opens the MiniDisc Community Forums (http://forums.minidisc.org) - MDCP: opens the MiniDisc Community Pages (http://www.minidisc.org) - MDcenter.nl - forums: opens our forums (http://www.mdcenter.nl/forum/) - MDcenter.nl: opens our main page (http://www.mdcenter.nl) AND A REAL USEFUL ONE (for those in Europe that use Connect and the US download of SonicStage 3.0: - Connect Europe: opens the Connect Europe website (http://www.connect-europe.com) Click here to download: [attachmentid=99] Good luck, P.s. it is very easy to edit this type of registry-file with a text-edittor to create your own version. SonicStage_browser.zip

Next week (wednesday the 9th) we from MDcenter.nl have an appointment with Sony Netherlands to have a "hands-on" with a couple of samplemodels of the new Hi-MD lineup. We also have the opportunity to ask questions and our list is already pretty long, but maybe we forgot something interesting. That's why I ask you wat you want us to ask them or what we defenately have to try out.

No SonicStage 2.4 or so. A totally new versionnumber. If the difference is as big as between SonicStage 1.5 and 2.0 I think I gonna like 3.0. Maybe they took a good look at iTunes?

Today I stumbled on upon this site: http://musicstore.connect.com/mb_us/mb_us/IESignup.flow With step 2 you can download the Sony MP3 Conversion Tool which is an add-on for SonicStage. This tool seems to be a simple way to convert large amounts of mp3's to ATRAC3plus in an easy way. Anyone who has some experience with this tool? Some additions: I tried it and it works as an easy way of scanning particular parts of your harddrive for mp3's (you can say where to search) and then they are converted to ATRAC3plus (bitrate you can choose). After completing conversion all ATRAC-files are available in SonicStage for export to e.g. Hi-MD. This way of importing/converting mp3's into SonicStage works easier than importing via SonicStage inself (probably the reason why the tool exists).

I would love to help but the problem is that SonicStage always seems to work normally so I cannot give any input about possible problems with SonicStage exept those that are already known. I would suggest to keep the installer as "clean" and "small" as possible so not to much extra backgrounds that probably nowone uses. For such things I would create an additionional installer.

1 GB discs are slightly bigger than 1,000,000,000 bytes 1,000,000,000 / 1024 = 976,562.5 kB 976,562.5 / 1024 = 953.67 MB The same as with harddisks, a 30 GB harddisk has 30,000,000,000 bytes of space = 27.9 GB. To be even more precise: in the Sony specs this is stated: `1,008,467,968 bytes, a portion of which is used for data management functions.` So 963 MB of free space is also what I get on a 1 GB disc and is perfectly normal. With flash/memory it is even more worse, some brands that sell 512 MB flashmemorycards actually sell cards that contain only a couple of MB more space than a 256 MB flash memory!

Do we have to call Sony UK or can we also post our findings via e-mail?

Tested it on my European NH700 and it works. First I connected my NH700 to a audio-mixer with led-levelmeter. Before the hack my levelmeter indicated just on the brink of 0 dB. After the hack it constantly sais 0 dB or more!

I don't think you have any idea where this topic is about. As for getting warrenty on the defect discs.... call Sony, not your reseller. They always want to do as little as possible. For portugal (although I don't understand the language): Contacte-nos em: Av. do Mediterrâneo Edifício Sony Parque das Nações 1990 – 156 Lisboa ou através de Telefone: 808 200 185 Telemovel:965 989 999 Mail: cic.portugal@eu.sony.com

I can check if there is dirt on the disc but this I don't think because we are talking about discs that came right out of shop and are brand new.

Today I tried to find out more about my damaged disc. So I created a textfile of exactly 1 MB (1024 KB). This textfile I renamed and copied 692 times with a batch-file to get enough data to fill the disc. I also created a checksum from the data and found a free md5 checksum-checker. I all included this is the following zip-file: http://www.mdcenter.nl/download/himd_disc_test.zip (less than 300 KB) I also wrote some instructions on how to use this all. Now the bad news. When I wanted to test if the checksum fails everything went well (also copying all data back to the PC), so it appears that after a couple of times (4 to 5) formatting the disc with SonicStage and filling up the disc with data it works fine. So I cannot test any further for the problem. Hopefully someone else can test its faulty discs to find out which part of the disc is damaged. Because the testdata I created consists of 1 MB files you can easily find out where on the disc the bad part is because the files are numbered according to the position where they will end up when you put them on a freshly formatted disc. Hopefully the checksum tells you not only the first file where the trouble starts but exactly which MB's of the Hi-MD are bad. To end this post: I'm a happy user because my discs seems to work fine now. Sadly I cannot do any further research on this problem, hopefully you can.

Tested it: bug with tracks longer than an hour fixed! Added a link to your project on: http://www.mdcenter.nl/forums/viewtopic.php?t=807

I quote the inlay of the disc: Hmm, this lets me think the discs I now have are imported from the US. That would be quite possible because the discs are not available in sufficient numbers in the whole of Europe. But as the inlay states, you have warrenty againt production faults and because the disc came new out of the box and immediately generated this problem Sony must replace the disc (maybe contact Sony Portugal in your case, I will try Sony Netherlands).

Today I got a 5 pack of 1 GB discs and the first disc I opened appears to have this problem to. I copied 3 zip-files of about 800 MB total. No problem, but because it are important backup-files I tried to copy them back to my HD to check if all data is copied correctly to the disc. When copying back I get an error from Windows Explorer stating "invalid file parameter". In the display of my Hi-MD I see "ACCESS ERROR". It happens almost every time at the same place on the disc. My original disc that I got with my NH700 has no problem and the second disc of my 5-pack seems to work okay too. So what I would suggest is collecting the serial-numbers on the back of the faulty Hi-MD's. Maybe there is a patern or Sony can make up a patern (faulty production line or date of production?) GOOD DISCS 4BAA1617E (came with my NH700) 4BAA1111F (2x) BAD DISCS 4BAB162PE Example of a disc serial number. p.s. there can be more than 1 disc with the same number. Probably the date of production and plant/machine is encoded in it.

Sadly no, It reads one of the *.hma files on the Hi-MD disc which contains the structure of the audio-directory in text-format. Sadly no such files are on a NetMD disc. Also a NetMD disc isn't available via Windows-explorer as a file that you can access.

Today I created some testscript in PHP that uses Hi-MD Lister exported textfile as an input to nicely represent what is on the Hi-MD-disc. The following example is the current contents of my 1 GB disc that I use daily when travelling by bus and train: http://www.mdcenter.nl/test/himdlister/