DmitryKo

Not to offend anyone, but MD had its momentum maybe until late 1990s, then its popularity was apparently declining and Sony took no major steps to breathe a new life in it. To me, the future of MiniDisc seemed very uncertain right back in 2001, but it feels like Sony was thinking heir being first to market with lossy audio compression can save them from competition forever. They were wrong, and when they finally realised the threat from CD recorders and MP3 CD and flash players, their response was slow and inadequate. NetMD was too little, too late, even if it were not crippled with that SonicStage of a disaster. But it were. Hi-MD could be somewhat more popular, if it weren't for DRM again. It could have a best chance if released, say, in the year 2000. But as flash memory is getting down to $30 per 1 GB with transfer speed an order of magnitude higher, Hi-MD simply has little chance, even with 2nd generation players' support for MP3 and user files. I feel sorry for everyone who doesn't trust computers and hard drives, but for the price of 1 HiMD disc you can have 10 DVD-R discs with 47 times the storage, and for the price of 50 HiMD discs you can have a low-end PC with a DVD burner and a flash player. That's about it for proprietary media formats, noone wants them anymore. Your MD unit is not going anywhere and you will still be able to use if for a long long time. I'd guess Sony won't be dropping Atrac3 support from their HD and flash players for a long time as well, so your PC library will be safe. And I can imagine how any future sound studio still having an ancient two thousands dollar ATRAC-R deck will offer to convert your "aging" grandpa MDs to new super hyper 3D holographic media, much like today's video studios offer to convert your old 16mm negative film to DVD

But can I connect the FM radio remote of NF series to any HiMD unit and effectively convert it to a radio model? I'm not happy with the lack of FM radio-capable 2nd generation players. I do have a small stand-alone Walkman radio, SRF-M10, but I just find it a little incovenient to carry two units and switch between them...

MDCenter.nl site has some ciphers of transfer rate. Not knowning Dutch at all, I can only suspect that DOESN'T talk about actual download times. So, if upload rade is 9,5 Mbits/sec, or 1.2 MBytes/sec, a full 1 GB download (i.e. from PC to the player) should take 950 MBytes /1.2 MBytes/sec = 790 s ~ 15 min bit. Correct me if I'm wrong please...

I've noticed that RealOne Player V2, that's supplied with all NetMD devices, allows storing the grabbed tracks in WAV format, as well as CBR and VBR MP3 (after downloading the high bitrate plugin) and RealAudio8, which uses ATRAC3 and has bitrates up to 353 Kbit/s. That raises two questions: first, why didn't Sony allow for storing the tracks in either WAV or ATRAC3 with higher bitrates (highly rethorical, no need to answer. "It's a Sony!" you know). Second, if one downloads the NetMD device plugin from Real site and the music is stored as WAV in Media Library, will the file undergo the same LP2 compression upon SP mode transfer from RealOne to NetMD device, or maybe there's a chance that LP2 compression step is skipped, or the plugin uses the same OMG database format and transfer utilities? And is there a SP transfer mode after all?