Fray Adjacent

I could echo many things mentioned here... Hopefully Sony IS reading this, and will take heed. WE are the market! HiMD has great potential. The MD is a great format. True, Sony screwed the pooch when they released it in the first place. The highest capacity recordable media at the time, were FDDs. Recordable CDs were close behind, however, reflecting on my childhood when I first handled a CD and thought "that's stupid!", recordable CDs still had the inherent flaw: Drop it or scratch it, your stuff goes bye bye. MD being smaller, and self contained/protected was a much better form of media. At the time, they may have only held a little more than 100MB, but think about what else came out around that time: The ZIP drive. Some people still use them, even though they are pretty rare (probably for similar reasons to Sony MD) I would like a HiMD data drive. I want to archive stuff on discs that will not degrade with time, and are reuseable. I also usually leave my HiMD player at work to listen to music. Now I even have a new use. I download TV shows and watch them on my laptop at work in the evenings, as I work 2nd shift. I don't download them directly to my laptop, though. I can copy files to one or two HiMD discs in the morning and put them in my laptop bag, then use the player at work to play the movies on my laptop. An internal drive would be nicer, tho. I don't like having a ton of USB devices plugged in willy-nilly all over my desk. Anyway, I hope Sony listens up, and does HiMD right.

I agree with Northstar on all of that... MD could be GREAT if Sony would get behind it and really push it. I'm talkin loosen up the restrictions, boom boxes and car decks. What's the real mystique of removable media if you can't take it somewhere else and play it in another device? I want to be able to copy MP3s to a disc, and take it to my car and listen to it there, then eject it at work and put it in my portable player and listen to it at work.

I don't think there has been any mention of a car deck from Sony yet. I'd love to have one, too, but we're just gonna have to keep waiting. (I'd love one to put in my Porsche... when I finish fixing up a few other things first)

If you drag and drop media files to a first gen HiMD, they will not play. If you drag and drop to a second gen HiMD, they will not play either. However, if you then take the device to another computer, and copy the files off of the device, they should play on the second machine. You have to use SonicStage to transfer the files to your device (second gen only) to be playable. (First gen would have to transcode to ATRAC to transfer to the device and play) Files transferred via Sonic Stage in MP3 or WMA format, if copied to another machine, will not be playable on that machine.

I backed up some pictures to a HiMD disk. Good for long term storage. Although I have coming up on 1.5GB of pictures, I'll need a few more discs.

WTF, m8?? You can take pics, but can't upload them to your PC????

I have a Sony CD/MP3 deck in my car that has a line in. I plugged my 600D into it and found the quality (From the headphone jack) was lacking. I'd prefer a dedicated MD player... hopefully someday, we'll have one!

You mean a car deck that will play HiMD? None have been mentioned by Sony yet. Could be some time before we see anything. BTW, you have a Porsche? I have a 1970 911T.

Un/reinstall sonicstage? Delete your database and recreate it?

I'll be happy when other media manufacturers get in on HiMD. Competition will bring out differing qualities and create competition. Hopefully Sony markets MD the way they SHOULD, and everyone throws away their Ipods and switches to MD!

ewps. I'm dislexic and crosseyed. It works itself out MOST of the time. hehehe

They ARE out in the US? Sweet!

I doubt it will work. The jack for the Ipod is not likely identical to the MZ-NH1. You can see the plug for the audio that goes into the heaphone out, but the other pins are likely where it draws power from. Again, not likely the Ipod has the same connector that the Sony units do.

I'll be buying in. I'm not sure which model... the RH10 probably. I currently have a 600D, and I usually just put some music on a disc and bring the unit in to work. Heck it stays here most of the time. The benefits of the second gen unit will pretty much be the ability to use my existing MP3 library, instead of having to either re-rip in ATRAC or transcode from MP3, resulting in database duplication. I use a few discs for backing up a few things, so that is helpful. Hopefully this will step HiMD into more popularity, and we'll eventually end up seeing a car head unit and stereo units. And maybe, just maybe a data drive for PCs.

We're not certain yet if MP3 files will be able to be dragged and dropped to the unit (via windows explorer) AND be playable. You can drag and drop them as data, but the info I'm gathering is, you will have to use Sony's SonicStage to copy MP3s to the device to make them playable. It will also envelope them in some form of DRM, disabling playback from the files if you copy them off of the disk to another computer. We're not sure on that as far as I can tell as of yet. Yes, approximately 300MB is the capacity when formatted in Hi-MD mode. You're right about that. I don't need more than 1GB of music with me at a time, unless I'm travelling. It will be much more versatile in that you don't have to transcode files to ATRAC3(+), not making you either convert all of your files, or have duplicates in a different format. Yeah, you should be able to plug your player into an amp and use it as a head system. Not recently, but probably more than I'd want to pay for something like that. My whole MP3 directory, with most of my CDs ripped in 320kbps non variable quality only comes to about 12GB. Definitely not really worth it to me to have almost 4 times as much space on a portable player. Right? What's two weeks worth of continuous audio if the battery only lasts a couple hours... AND is not easily interchangeable? Word. True. They seem pretty well made, though. Pretty sturdy. But don't think about dropping one when it's running. That hdd would go bye-bye easily. I've dropped my D600 a couple times while playing, and it kept on going with no ill effect. You may have that right. But if Sony pulls this off, the second and future generations of MD players just might be as stupid-easy as Ipods are.

I believe Bockers was talking about an in-dash unit for autos or an in car changer... thus they wouldn't require batteries. With the second generation of HiMD including support for MP3, an in dash unit may be a neccessary step for HiMD growth. If Sony plays it right, HiMD could gain a good marketshare and become a very versatile medium or platform for portable audio, digital audio and data storage. Tell people they can get a HiMD recorder, a HiMD car deck and they can directly copy MP3s to inexpensive, high capacity discs, and I think a lot of people would buy into it. This could end up being a move that could eventually replace CDs as audio media.

dclarke, I think the CD degradation was only on some old, cheaply made CDs. Most quality manufactured discs should not suffer 'CD rot'. I recall reading an article about it not long ago.

I agree with all of the above. When I first saw an MD (a buddy at work back in 1996 got a portable player and stereo deck), I thought it was absolutely amazing. This was before the days of MP3 and digital audio players. My thought was, that little disc would make a great replacement standard for the 3.5" Floppy Disk drive! Then ZIP disk, SuperDisk and a few others... none caught on... probably mostly because of marketing and expensive media. With MD and HiMD being relatively inexpensive, Sony could make a move to make MiniDisc a new removable data medium standard. As far as a player/recorder goes, you're right on the nose about it. The majority of people using portable audio devices are only going to copy digital audio to the device for playback. Not a lot will use a microphone or line in recording function, but it can be nice to have. Sony needs to wake up and see that. If they sell it as a digital audio PLAYER, capable of playing standard formats in common use without arbitrary restrictions. Open it up, and they should be able to market it and sell 'em like hotcakes!

+1 on all of the above My process is, I buy a CD, take it home, rip it to MP3 (320Kb/s constant bitrate), save it to my server with the rest of my MP3s, rip directly from CD to ATRAC3+ (256Kb/s) and record to HiMD. Then the CD goes on my rack with all of my other CDs. A new CD is only ever out of it's case for a few hours, but having the CD gives me the freedom to rip it however I want to, and have it as an original source in case anything happens to my digital copies.

Turn on the write protect on the disc. Then play with it. No possibility of damaging the original on the MD.

The digital amp is not a 'class D' amp. What the digital amp does is changes the amplitude of the signal before it gets converted to analog. Class A, A/B and D amps are analog amps.

So all that thing does is copy files from a memory card to HiMD? If that is so, then Sony really must hope HiMD will be a good viable data storage medium. That may or may not be a good thing...

Short answer: no. This could be a 'not yet', as sony MAY make a newer version of SonicStage support taking recordings from your HiMD unit to CD. They may not, knowing Sony. The workaround is to plug your HiMD unit into your Audio In on your sound card and record the audio in realtime.

If you RECORD on the unit, then I do not think you will be able to edit using anything, due to the secured format... ... but if you have sound files from some other source copied to HiMD as data, then you could do whatever you want with it.

Michael, I'd say check WalMart, but I don't think they've opened they're MOCKBA location. Wally land has a rack location for them already, and has a tag for a three pack of HiMD discs for $9.99, but they don't have them in stock yet. They're just putting a 5 pack of 80 minute disks with a sticker that says 'HiMD compatible' on that rack location....