mmp64

I would check out Sony's "S" series Walkman. Excellent sound for a portable, great battery life - and supports drag and drop. Once again, their software sucks, but as I said, they are drag and drop from Explorer, and can also be used with Windows Media Player, Winamp, etc. etc. No integration like you get with an iPod and iTunes in terms of smart playlists, etc., which is unfortunate. http://www.sonystyle.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?catalogId=10551&storeId=10151&langId=-1&productId=8198552921665940169 As far as the original topic - MD was killed in the States when Sony shut down the Connect store and stopped supporting ATRAC. To my knowledge, there is no place - bricks & mortar or online - to buy "new stock" MD units in the US, because there aren't any. There is no place to buy blanks, other than eBay and a handful of online specialty stores (and I believe they are importing them). Sony's own web site does not sell MD units or blanks - so, it is over, and has been over for quite some time. To paraphrase Dickens, MD is deader than a doornail. I'm speaking as someone with over 15 portable units (one I just got yesterday), two decks, and a car unit, so I'm devoted to the cause, but I have no illusions. I won't go in to great detail about what went wrong - but will just say that my personal belief is that NetMD killed MD in the States. It had a reasonably high profile (you could go into Best Buy and get one) - so a fair amount of people bought them or were at least aware of them. But as a consume product, at that time, NetMD was a disaster - if for no other reason than they plastered a giant "MP3" on the box implying to Joe Sixpack that he could plug his MD into the USB on his PC and drag his pilfered Metallica MP3s onto the cute little discs. Oops. Though having said all of that, there is that Tascam deck - but obviously that is not Sony, and it is not HiMD. http://www.tascam.com/products/md-cd1.html Because MILLIONS and MILLIONS of tape decks, Walkmans, etc. etc. were sold for multiple decades, by multiple manufacturers. I would be surprised if total sales for MDs reached even 1% of tape.

Yes, they do, though I personally have never tested it. I get around the gapless issue on MP3 players by ripping "medleys" (i.e., stuff on Side 2 of Beatles Abbey Road) as one track).

Never mind.

http://cgi.ebay.com/NIB-SONY-PORTABLE-MD-PLAYER-MZ-E7W-BOSS-LIMITED-EDITION-/260592611444?cmd=ViewItem&pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item3cac87b074#ht_4844wt_874 Never mind. I guess it's real. I thought it was some bizarre scam.

Somewhere on here there is a really good thread on this subject. To me, the sound of an HD amp is brighter, and the individual elements of a track more distinctly separated, if that makes sense. The analogue amp is warmer, sounding closer to vinyl/tape. As far as your second question, I would not think it is possible to "disengage" the amp - I would think there is only one amp and that is it.

Yes, I started making mix tapes in about 1977, and really stuck with cassettes until 2000 or so, or whenever I bought my first MD. Even though it was cumbersome (the 37) and did not integrate with a PC, it was magic compared with cassette. I was amazed by the ability to re-order, delete and edit tracks. In fact, when I first heard about NetMD, I didn't get it. Why would you want to use a computer?

My suggestion would be to buy a Sony ATRAC CD player - a used one in good condition, like the DN-F430. It offers the most versatility of any device for folks with ATRAC libraries. Obviously will play audio CDs (so you don't need to rip them) - ATRAC CDs gaplessly, MP3 CDs, and some with AM/FM Radios, etc. etc. And you get the nice Sony sound. I actually bought a 2nd generation ATRAC CD player (not gapless) for $2.76. I know this doesn't directly address your point, but the fact is that Sony has not supported any of this for quite some time. At some point, I would imagine that even the links to the CDDB will stop working in SS. Interestingly, the original ATRAC CD players shipped with a "CD" version of Simple Burner that allowed you to rip ATRAC directly to CD. I've been looking for one of those discs for a while.

They tried that a little later with the "Psych" and other Downloaders - but it was too late, and those were cheap and in many cases, ugly. It would have made sense a couple of years earlier to differentiate between high end and low end. Not sure about not developing HiMD. When you think about the cost of a 1 GB flash drive vs. a 1 GB HiMD disc - the case was fairly compelling. But again, by that time, it was probably too late. Also - the differences between Standard MD, NetMD and HiMD and all of the various permutations of bit rates was probably way beyond the comprehension of the average consumer. Another thing they did wrong around the time of HiMD was default to HiLP as the standard Codec. A lot of people never make changes to those settings because they don't know how - and despite Sony's fantasys, HiLP was not better than 128 MP3 or particularly 128 AAC - the standard on iPods. Really not even close for Pop and Rock music.

Were those ever for sale in the US?

All of the features/challenges that you reference are essentially true - and so far over the head of the average consumer. Lots of people can't even figure out how to use iTunes - (i.e., that you have to rip a CD first, then copy the files it creates to your iPod). I'm a geek, so I loved all of the insanely over-engineered nonsense of the MD. But Joe Sixpack was completely lost. I personally think that the real death of MD was the NetMD MP3 issue - when they put "MP3" in giant letters on the box, yet the device did not play MP3s. If they had done two things - 1st - let users drag and drop MP3s to the discs, and 2nd - made Simple Burner an integrated part of SS, or promoted the ability to rip directly to MD more - they would have been much better off. The whole concept of the units "supporting" MP3 was so absurd. Even to this day - when you read descriptions of units for sale on eBay - people STILL don't get it.

I believe it is because Sony never licensed HiMD to anyone else, probably because no one cared at that point.

Check this out (not my auction). Looks beautiful. http://cgi.ebay.com/RARE-Sony-Hi-MD-Mini-disc-MD-recorder-MZ-NH3D-Blue_W0QQitemZ300398893301QQcmdZViewItemQQptZLH_DefaultDomain_0?hash=item45f12b58f5#ht_6763wt_1017

There are a bunch of MZ-NH1s on eBay for some reason - 6 or 7. One refers to it as a "Professional HiMD Recorder" - which cracks me up. These are not my auctions - I sold mine once, and was so bummed that my wife got me another one off eBay as a birthday present so I would stop whining about having sold it. http://cgi.ebay.com/Sony-MZ-NH1-Hi-MD-Walkman_W0QQitemZ320475827689QQcmdZViewItemQQptZLH_DefaultDomain_0?hash=item4a9dd90de9#ht_500wt_1085

I see silly things like this on eBay sometimes. I have to stop myself from contacting the sellers - on pricing, descriptions, etc. But that could become a full-time job.

I have used it in the past, and I do like it. I made several mix discs using the plugin. I have since switched over to Mac and unfortunately have had to give it up. There are similar programs for the Mac (most notably, "Hear", but I have not tried them yet). You do have to be careful to not go too overboard with DFX though.

AFAIK - no MD unit is USB 2.0 - the optical drive cannot handle that speed (EDIT - my understanding is that the later units "support" USB 2.0 but don't really transfer any faster than USB 1.1 speeds because of the limitations imposed by the optical drive). Regarding the other discussion about transcoding MP3 to ATRAC - of course it takes longer the first time you transcode the file, and of course you lose quality. You may not be able to tell, depending on an almost infinite number of factors. However, once the file has been transcoded, it remains on your hard drive (unless you set the options to be deleted after transfer) so it doesn't take any longer the next time you transfer the file.

Type S only impacts LP2 and LP4 playback. Below are random posts I've assembled over the years regarding Type R vs. Type S, because I always had trouble keeping it straight: "type R : only works on recording side on SP only it's a better alogrithm to analyse the bits from ur recording source type S : type S DOES include type R additional thing is the improvement on playback of LP2/LP4 tracks type S only works when u have a player that have type S and only works when playing LP2/LP4 tracks, will not works for SP tracks main difference : type R works at recording side type S works both at recording side(coz it include type R) and playback side(for LP2/LP4 only) type S claimed to produce better sound at playback side on treble part of LP2/LP4 tracks and, type R only work in real time recording any fast cd-->md dubbing won't have type R function if u doubt about type R only work at real time, u can contact Sony CS representative at ur region no, this information is hidden from ur manuals but, if u ever contact any one in Sony who know something about MD, they will surely tell u what I've just told u "ATRAC Type-S is just a combined, one-chip DSP for the ATRAC Type-R codec used for SP mode and the ATRAC3 codec used for MDLP modes. Supposedly, Type-S increases the SNR of LP2 and LP4 encodings by 6dB upon playback, but doesn't offer any improvement for SP encodings."

It would seem to me that yes, MD was more popular in the UK than in the States. Just based on reading posts here for many years. It would be interesting to consider why. Possibly because Apple was later to the market in the UK vs. the US.

The problem is - you can still go to any CVS Pharmacy in <Your Town> and buy a cassette player, and probably even blank cassettes. Not so w/ MD. So - yeah - it is dead. Dead like Saturn (I have one of those too). Doesn't mean we need to stop using it, but eventually, all of our units will die and there won't be any "New in Box" units to buy on eBay. For the older among us - we are probably OK (at least until our hearing has gone and it doesn't matter anymore). But for the younger ones - I would not invest a lot in recording stuff on MD (concerts, guitar practice, etc. etc.). Particularly on HiMD units, which seem to be very fragile.

Keep in mind most of those cheap batteries are knockoffs, so use them at your own risk. I have used them - they haven't exploded or anything, but they also have not lasted as long as the real ones.

You are correct. I have a Sony NWZ-A816 and it sounds fantastic. I did a lot of comparisons between it and my Sony MDs, NW-HD1 and iPods. It is very, very close to my MZ-NH1, which is my best-sounding MD.

There are numerous reasons, but in the States, I think the thing that really killed MD was NetMD. NetMD was introduced before iPods had become completely ubiquitous, so they had a chance to succeed (at least for a time) - but the packaging was VERY misleading in that the most prominent text was "MP3." This gave people the reasonable idea that they could hook the unit up to their PC, and drag their MP3 files to these cool, little, and cheap blank MDs. Unfortunately, nothing could have been further from the truth, given the unpleasant experience of using early versions of SonicStage (OpenMG Jukebox or whatever it was called) - with the conversion to ATRAC, the check-in, check-out nonsense, etc. etc. I think if they had truly enabled you to drag-and-drop MP3s, even through SonicStage (though through Explorer would have been better) - MD would have held it's own for another couple of years. Being the total MD geek that I am, I really liked NetMD and still use them as my primary units, because they are cheap on eBay, take standard "AA" batteries, and are built like tanks.

I agree with the point about the battery. Tired of messing around with the expensive, finicky and proprietary Sony gumsticks. I'm basically back to MD/NetMD because of that issue, and the relative scarcity and price of the HiMD units vs. Net MD units. Plus the older units seem more reliable to me - my MZ-N505s and MZ-NF610s are still going after years of heavy use. My MZ-NH900 crapped out quite a while ago. I baby my NH-1 - it is more like a work of art sitting in it's dock on my night stand. Sorry - a bit of a ramble. I also agree with the points about last generation HiMD units being more powerful in terms of supporting all of the various formats, and most importantly being able to upload. Depending on what you are doing, that could be key.

Not quite a Swiss vault, but I've purchased a couple of 505s and 510s (they seem to be the sturdiest, and they can use any AA battery) - put them in sealed plastic bags, then in a storage bin and put that in a cool, dark room. I'm 44 - so I'm thinking by the time those units go, I'll either be deaf or won't care. In general - I've been disappointed with the durability of HiMD units - battery problems, read problems, etc. I bought a used 505 probably 7-8 years ago, ripped a 5-600 CD library on it twice (at least) - and it still works.

Make what open format?