marcnet

Domain Wall Displament .... something something something. Its basically a technology that takes advantage of the fact that magnetics can write data at a finer resolution than a laser can. The reading is then done by a laser. The switching and displacement layers of a HIMD disc make Each data "spot" bigger in physical size than it actually is http://forums.minidisc.org/viewtopic.php?t=5553 and http://www.minidisc.org/hi-md_faq.html

^ That program makes uses my program to convert to .wav and then to .mp3 The latest version of HIMDRenderer (0.31 to date) converts .oma direct to mp3 http://www.marcnetsystem.co.uk/himd/

Download and try my program out... see how you find it. I think that will be the best way to find out whether my program is easy to use. Any questions? Just post it on my site or this forum and ill try to answer it as quickly as possible. Even better if you know how to use IRC chat, join an Undernet server and pop by my room (#marcchat). If im not away Ill try to answer any questions you may have,

I dont think its possible unless you rewrite the firmware on the actual minidisc unit to do such a thing.

No. Read my previous post in this thread.

Hmmm indeed The API of the various encoders probably have the ability to set tag information and such things. The trickier part would be extracting the tag data from the oma/omg file. Next release will be a bugfix release only, but ill look into it.

23/30? Thats quite loud. I can get away with about 14/30 before it starts to annyoy everyone in the office. I use the EQ as well.(set at 3,1,0,0,1,3) I think you should try different earphones. I use a pair of £15 Philips ones (I cant remeber the model number as i threw the box away - they're red and silver with sticky-out bits in the black rubber). With that EQ setting, the sound is excelent.

/me points to the dontaion button on his site :smile:

huh? No... this program would simply list *hence the words "Listing program") the contents of a HI-MD disc. There would be no upload functionality. If you read my post carefully you would see that I got as far as being able to list the track names on the disc. Uploading without sonicstage would require 1) The ability to grab the audio data of the HI-MD and set up Sonys DRM databases/files to allow the playing (and the HIMDRendering) of the track 2) Reverse engineering the Sony DRM encryption and creating an ATRAC3 decoder to decode the resultant Both options are far, far, far away.

I posted this in the minidisct forums, but I thought id post here to get a bigger response: I was experimenting with direct upload (without sonicstage) on my HIMDRenderer program. I got as far as being able to list the track names on the disc. Decoding the audio prooved to be a little moe trickey. Anyway, I can get a track listing off a hi-md disc. I can develop this into a program so that you can simply copy+paste into Excel, Word, notepad, email etc. Would anyone be interesting in such a program? What sort of stuff (features) would you like to see ?

Yes. HIMDRenderer requires that you install Sonicstage 2.1 or later. HIMDRenderer uses DirectShow and the DirectShow modules that are installed when you install SonicStage 2.1. The error "failed to create dec splitier." (badly spelt, sorry) means that my program failed to create the "OMG Decoder Spliiter" Sony Directshow module. Also, just to add a small note, the .oma file need to be playable in SonicStage for them to work with my program.

Well.... I have released it. And i have posted a link on the minidisc forum Go to the HI-MD section of the minidisc forum. See the announcement at the very top? View it and you'll see the second post describes version 0.3 Also there is a "latest version" button on version 0.22 and 0.3. This will display a message box describing the lastest version of himdrenderer available from my site. In the case of "today" (and yesterday, and the day before) it will be 0.30

I got 70 random tracks from various sources (CD, mp3's,oggs). I Stuck them all into a foobar2000 play list and did a "replaygain all as single album" scan on them. I then enabled replaygain in the diskwriting preferences and wrote all the tracks as .wav files into a seperate folder. I then stuck these .wav files into SonicStage to transfer to MD 2 problems: 1) The tracks are now all quieter than normal. I think I need to add "volume" to the DSP list to get around this. 2) The tracks still vary in volume! I listen to the first track (Atari Teenage Riot --- Redefine the enemy '97) and the next track (Audioslave --- Exploder) and I still need to adjust the volume manually to acheive a constant listening volume level Is there anything better out there? Something that I can simply pick a DB level to normalise to, select a bunch of .wav files and say "go".

Since I transfer tracks from lots of different CD's to a single MD (4.5 hours of LP2 now with HI-MD on a 74 minute disc) I too would like a good normalizer. However, all these tracks can vary in volume while all of them are at 100% peak already. Anyone know of a good normalizer that uses the loudness of the track instead of the PCM peaks? It would be nice to just select a bunch of .wav/mp3/whatever files and say "Normalise to -14 db"

Nope. I can follow and confirm what poorlyconditioned wrote. But thats about it. I have no idea what the other values are in the .OPF file

Okay. The missing DLL is at: http://www.marcnetsystem.co.uk/libmmd.zip Sorry, one or more of the encoder DLL's needs it and it was already installed on my system

No. All settings will be on the main dialog. The difference now is that you have 3 extra buttons: Processing options, Advanced options and output options. Each one will display a common group of options. Options for the chosen encoder will be displayed in the "output options" group.. If you dont get what I mean then just wait for the release later on today :smile:

One obvious way: My program uses DirectSound as a reference clock. The most obvious side-effect of this is that sound is produced during the conversion process. Ill probably get around to writing an alternate clock source one day, but its not on my high list of priorities Oh and im about to release version 0.3 sometime tonight, or maybe tomorrow. Expect FLAC,OGG and MP3 writing options in this next release.

Most of the DLL's are COM based. So you'd have to know the exact interface ID, class ID, and Interface function pointer structure to use them. Oh and realtime debugging wont work. Sony have seen to it to crash any program that happens to be using one of their DLL's under a debugging session.

Does this mean my program has become obsolete or not? I guess if I continue adding mp3,flac,etc support it will become less obsolete....

Have you tried this with recorded material? IE: Taking audio data that was recorded and has not yet been uploaded via SonicStage? It seems that the data from a LineIn/MicIn recording in the ATDATAXX.HMA file differs completly to the data in the resultant uploaded OMA from SonicStage. The only thing that hasnt changed is the key at 0x40c (or 0xc0c in the case of uploaded OMA files). Its as if SonicStage is reading and decrpyting data from the HIMD, re-encrypting it and then storing it as a OMA file. The decryption key is then stored in Sony's DRM database. I think thats why SonicStage wont upload the track the second time. Its stored the key from the first upload (whether its trashed it or not). When you try to upload a second time it searches and finds the tracks key in the DRM database. It then knows that its already been uploaded, so proceeds to delete the track instead. Unless im doing something wrong, it looks like its going to be very difficult to bypass the SonicStage step. In order to this recorded audio data from the ATDATAXX.HMA file will need to be decrypted (and possibly re-encrypted) manually. Anyone good at cracking encryption?

Ill get right on that. If my program could bypass the sonicstage rubbish totally... I think my program would be more usefull Oh.. and track names seem to be at 0x40010

It never reaches 100% . It should, but it dosnt. Its simply a bug in my percentage display. My program basically polls the current DirectShow position every 125ms or so. It then works out the percentage of each polled position in releation to the end of the file. The reason it never shows 100% is because as soon the DirectShow render process finishes, the polling stuff is told to stop. So it will only report the last polled position at the end of rendering. So yes. 100% of the file is processed and output to .WAV . Its just that the program dosnt tell you so. It'll be fixed in the next release.

Actually, its 15 now. Two more people have been kind. I just havn't got around to updating my site. Too busy programming and all that :smile: Anyway. Thanks a dozen (and more) for all your support. I shall continue to improve HIMDRenderer in my spare time and provide as much support as time (and patience) will allow.

Because the Sony Direct show modules only allow a maximum of 1 minute to be rendered in one go. So I have to pause and resume the Direct Show graph before each minute (the block size). And because simply resuming from the paused point will cause loss of data, I step back the Direct Show position by a small amount (the overlap amount). This, however, produces bits of repeated audio. Repeated audio is easier to deal with than missing audio, so thats why my program does what it does.