Qwakrz

Thanks I have been looking for that cable for ages, thought that it was no longer made. Will now have to pop out and see what model headunit I have to make sure its in the "Works with" list.

The main feature, I would have thought, of going from SP >> Hi-MD in PCM via optical >> PC via USB would be the copying of track marks. I dont know if a PC soundcard is capable of copying the marks when they appear on the digital cable. One other thing, not everyone has digital inputs on their PC.

One thing to remember, Minidisc was designed to edit recordings. This is very difficult to do with VBR tracks (which AtracLL is) but very easy on CBR recordings. I dont think we will see AtracVBR or AtracLL on minidisc for recording purposes any time soon (if at all) as its not practical to edit it using a simple device. There is nothing stopping them allowing transfer from SS to Hi-MD in a similar fashion to the way MP3 is now but this will not happen with current Hi-MD's.

I have a standard MD disc here full of Hi-LP recordings that I take to uni with me, when traveling on the bus I cant tell the difference between Hi-LP and Hi-SP due to the background noise. When I am at home though I swap the my Hi-SP discs as I can hear the loss in quality you get with Hi-LP because its a quiet environment.

Yes you will get a generation loss but I think you'll be hard pushed to tell the difference. I rip in 352K now so that I have the best quality when I want it but can also goto lower bitrates when I want to fit more on a disc, e.g. for playback in work or on the move when you cant really hear the difference in quality.

SS 3.4 removed the restriction so you can now copy digital recorded Hi-MD's into SS and convert to WAV. SS 3.3 still has this restriction though You might need a copy protection stripper in the digital MD -> Hi-MD transfer, or find a deck that removes it for you.

As said above, 80% charge is 60 mins. I leave mine on charge overnight so that it is fully charge for the morning as you can never know when its fully charged and it is not possible to overcharge the battery as the charging circuit disconnects it when its 100% full. If you are not going to use it for a while, charge it till the light goes out (80%) and then store the battery out of the unit somewhere cool.

The best way to destroy the contents on a MD is to put it inside the worlds most powerfull magnet. MD can be corrupted by a huge magnet as in normal use the disc is heated to lower the magnetic field needed to change the bits, at room temp it can still be affected but you do need a huge magnetic field (bigger than you will find in most labs).

Just remember to rip all the tracks in ATL using the 352K option as converting from ATL to AT for copying onto an MD will use the lossy part & wont look at the lossless part. (ATL = Atrac Lossless, AT = Atrack or Atrack+)

Other useless markings.... Tesco's Tiramisu on bottom of pack - Caution do not turn this product over. Tesco's Salted Peanuts - Caution, this product may contain traces of nuts as it was made in a factory that uses nut products. Dont give up on MD just because it had one problem. Personally if I had a recording that was important, the first thing I would do is import it into SS and then edit it so that if anything happened I could go back and retry. Did you have the unit connected to the mains when editing as it draws alot of power when editing and it could well be that there was not enough left to write to the disc. Get the unit replaced under household insurance. I know of very few MP3 players that are good recorders and few will take anything like the abuse a Minidisc can take and keep running. I also hate having to carry a charging unit around with me with my MP3 player, prefer to take the MD and a spare set of AA batteries.

It might not be transcoding but encrypting. I doubt that sony will go through a generation loss just to keep the bitrate the same, it is probably encrypting the file before sending it to the player. Hold on, this is sony though, could well be re-enoding

And dont forget that the uninstaller that runs when you upgrade does not delete your security key for DRM'd tracks and keeps the library in place. Only time I would ever recomend a full uninstall is if you have problems, have a backup of your music library or have not used DRM when importing your discs.

But the fact still stands the an MP3 file sounds terrible comparied to the same transcoded MP3 to Atrac file when played back on a Hi-MD 2nd gen unit. I agree that playback of a transcoded MP3 file on a PC would show signs of a generation loss but the playback of MP3 files is so poor on the 2nd gen HiMD units that it actually makes it sound loads better.

There are 2 ways to erase an MD disc. 1) Heat it upto its phase change point (I think its 180C) and then submit it to a small magnetic field. 2) Use a mega powerfull magnet. I think an experiment was done with a rare earth magnet and it had to be placed on the disc (i.e shutter open and the magnet placed onto the actual disc) to actually damage the data. Most magnetic fields in every day use will not affect minidisc. The only place I can think you'll have problems with minidisc is if you are in an RMI machine but I would seriously question things if they let you take a minidisc into one.

Stuck I am afraid I would love multiple folders, even in sonic stage for organising my music collection, but alas you cannot have nested folders (folders within folders)

The only reason I can think of that sony would say use dry cells only is that it connects directly accross the internal battery & will charge it all the time the dry cell is atached. If you put a Ni-MH battery in there then there is a chance that if the internal one is fully charged and the external one is not, the internal will charge the external. Personally I have used Ni-MH cells in the external case since I have owned my R900 and never had a problem, still use them now with my RH10.

Yeah, the driver for NetMD is 32bit and as such will not work in XP64 as XP64 uses 64 bit drivers only. XP64 does not have the needed driver built in either. I have given up with Net-MD anyway so will be staying with XP64 & if need be I have a dual boot to XP32 anyway.

Well, after a few months of waiting for drivers and university work to clear I have taken the plunge and installed XP64. I thought, for those wanting to know what will & will not work, I would report back on SS and SB results with XP64 profesional here. SonicStage and SimpleBurner install without problems, no errors. Hi-MD works BUT you cannot use any Net-MD functions so if you try to format a disc in Net-MD format it will not be seen by SS or SB. Net-MD units will NOT work at all, no drivers are available. All data functions on the drive work so you can use Hi-MD as removable media There is one slight problem, sometimes when you change a disc with SS open it will report that the disc is an invalid format, just remove the disc & re-insert. This, I think, is due to the fact that SS can't disable the autorun feature in XP64 so windows grabs the disc first locking SS out. I have had no problems putting disc in and then running SS.

If you are going to use it every day then it is best to put it on charge overnight & then take it to use the next day. Li-ion batteries like to be recharge frequently if they are used regularly. The lower the discharge gets the more damage that happens to the battery, you should get a few years out of it if you chanrge from 30% upto full each time. Constant 0% recharges will give you about 0.5 - 1 year.

There is no way to access the sample rate converter, you just feed the signal into the optical in. There is no configuration and the unit will convert 32, 44.1 and 48khz signals into 44.1khz for recording onto the disc.

The NH1 does include a sample rate converter. I have fed it so far with 44.1khz and 48khz samples and it has recorded at 44.1khz with both of them, changing the samplerate on the fly. I doubt, however, that it will be able to cope with changing from 96khz or 24bit.

I can hear the difference between the RH10 and NH1 (uses same amp as NH900) Its not much but the NH1 seems cleaner but for general use there is practically no difference. The main thing is I can hear background hiss on my RH10 that seems to go after a few seconds of starting playback. Its annoying if I am listening to a quiet track in a quiet room. The NH1 is crystal clear with no hiss.

Yes it is possible to use ANY format for the disc (I use NTFS for my Uni work on one of my discs as it allows compression). The problem with Hi-MD over 2GB is that it will not be backwardly compatable with existing units and would therefore either i) cause confusion with existing users ii)not appear in its current Hi-MD name and use a new player / recorder. Discs over 2GB would not be usable as audio discs with current machines, If sony release a new series of units then they could change the file system format to FAT32 and this would allow them to increase the disc size BUT they would loose the ability to play these discs in older Hi-MD machines. (Why did sony only use FAT in the Hi-MD???)

The NH900 does not use Li-ion. It uses a the gumstick Ni-MH battery

But Minidisc uses FAT not FAT32 so we have this 2GB limit on partition size. If you try and force FAT32 (by conversion using windows) the Minidisc is useless and has to be re-formatted back to FAT using SS or the player. FAT and FAT32 are not compatable, they are based on the same structure but FAT only systems cannot read FAT32 partitions. Partition limit for FAT is 2GB Partition limit for FAT32 is 2TB File size limit for FAT32 & FAT is technically 4GB (FAT can only handle partion size of 2GB as above so 2GB is the physical limit) File size limit for AVI files is 2GB (where most people get the max file size for FAT from, they can go bigger but index gets corrupted and most players wont play them) There are no aproachable limits on NTFS (They are present but we wont hit them for several more years yet)