MadDuck

Very good point! I did a format hack to squeeze 1.3 GB out af an SFD-1000 drive back in the day, and that was straight magnetic! More than one of my old 60 min MDs turned out to be 74 min And the very fact that a Hi-MD format extends the capacity of an older non Hi-MD disk, gives me hope!!! I've read many times the Hi-MD overview. It looks like a tigher pit/valley format COULD be possible. Anyway....... We'll see!

The 3.6 GB Hi-MD rumor? I have no idea. It sounds good, and very probable. The million dollar questions are: 1. is it real? 2. How much will the blanks be? 3. And when can I get some????

Very interesting! I remember seeing a variable speed CLV LD disc demo from SONY about 11 years ago. It altered the tag list (I think that what LDs called their TOC info and speed) and it would give 2 hours of playback on one side of a disc, double the current capacity. It would work on current Laserdisc players and require, acording to SONY, a minor retooling of current LD mfgr plants. So I believe anything is possible, and optical formats offer a great variety of formating! WOW, huh?

And I would like to take full credit for this! Let's see what the future holds...

Just to drive the point home, this MD recorder is incredible! If you don't have one, get one. What will it NOT do? Besides synce effortlessly with iTunes on my Mac.....

used the discount, got mine! It is the SWEETEST minidisc recorder I have EVER had. I've had many over the past decade, and this one blows them away.

Well--- I am ready! Today I ordered my MZ-RH1 from Minidisco.com. I've setup shortcuts on my desktop for my relavent iTuns folders for Podcasts, Limewire, top 25 played, etc... It will make finding and draging music into Hi-MD Music Transfer a bit easier. Once it's in, I ponied up for UPS 3 day shipping, I'll keep my experiences posted on how well it works, etc.. I can hardly wait!! Really!

Jari- You will find better explanations elsewhere on this forum, but here's a summerization: NetMD will not work with a Macintosh Hi-MD will be recognized by a Mac and can be used as data storage, heck I've even booted my OS9 Mac WITH my Hi-MD player, took forever, but it worked!! The SonicStage software is for windows only, no exceptions. When an .mp3 is sent to a newer (.mp3 capable) Hi-MD player it is (for some reason) put in a DRM wrapper. Until recently, you had to be running Windows to do that. Enter Hi-MD Music Transfer. It allows you to drag and drop .mp3 files from you Macintosh to a .mp3 enabled Hi-MD player. It wraps the .mp3 files in the DRM wrapper and shoots them across your USB (1.1 or 2.0) conection to the Hi-MD player. ATRAC, as of now, is still officially unsupported on anything other than Windows. Hope this helps, and feel free to ammend anything I may of gotten wrong! I will be getting a MZ-RH1 at the end of the week, and I can't wait to start draging and dropping things onto it!!

From what I've seen & read about it, parrells is a crap shoot, the odds are in your favor, but still..... Your best bet is boot camp WITH a FAT32 partition, so it can read your .MP3 files back and forth between OSes

Indeed...... While having a full interface like iTunes or (shutter!) Sonic Stage would be nice, I guess dragging & dropping won't be so bad! I'll just have to make sure that my Podcasts are in .mp3 format now! I could add shortcutts to my folders on the desktop and TRY to make it as elegant as possible! Does anyone know a place in Houston, Texas (U.S.A.) where I could get one locally? If not, then it's off to my buddies at Minidisco!! One more question, will the transfer software work with Sony's .mp3 players too? They have some SWEET ones out now!! What a coincidence! Minidisco (my personal fav. MD spot on the .net!) is offering an additional savings on an RH-1. Good thing payday is on the 8th! There goes my money! Between www.headfi.com and now this, I'm gona be so happy/broke!

Intresting....... I've got a couple of Mac questions that I hope you can help me with. 1. I downloaded the Hi-MD Music Transfer software and installed it. I hooked my trusty NHF 800 and was surprised that it found it and pulled up the tracks! I could move, delete and rename tracks, but can I create any GROUPS there? 2. I am about to take the plunge and get a MZ RH-1 as I have finally expunged Windows from my home! Will the software be able to find and use my iTunes library to feed the player? Thanks! I scanned the forums for theses questions, and couldn't find the answers. Everything else that I could possibly want to know about recording, and importing has been addressed! My iPod 5G 30GB was stolen from my dest at work, hence my quest to upgrade now! Also I'm running OSX 10.4.7 1 GB RAM, on a 700Mhz G4 Thanks again!!

..... Actually no! With my color iPod, iTunes will automaticly send the album art over for you. On my Mac (my main computer) I use a program called Clutter to get the cover art off of Amazon US or UK, and I Eat Brainz to get the correct .mp3 tag info. I'm sure there are windows equivilants that will work with SS 3.x to correctly tag and art your songs. I only keep a windows PC to fill my MZ NHF 800. It will be my main Hi-MD player until Sony adds the radio remote capability to a better one! Glad you like your player!!!

gee.... Or Sony could just made a MD unit that can do MP3 and M4A and bypass the entire transcoding nightmare!!

I honestly just haven't gotten around to testing out the 600D on VPC yet, anybody else tried?? ALSO- I was in CompUSA yesterday and picked up FIVE new retail pcked HI-MD blanks!!! BTW they were stacked over with the ZIP discs, not with the standard blank MDs for some reason!?!? The Sony Style store(Houston Galleria across the street from CompUSA) can't get them, back ordered on Sony.com (try to add them to your cart!), audiocubes is having 'shipping delays' NONE are listed on Ebay (tho some PPL are selling the toss-in ones from time to time) and my buddies on minidisco aren't even listing them yet on their site! So, yes, I kinda feel luck having found them, I actually went in there to get a 128MB SD RAM card for my Tung E. Has anyone else actually found thoses blanks anywhere??

JUST WHEN I THOUGHT IT COULDN'T GET ANY MORE WEIRDER! I plugged the 600D in to my other Mac (running 9.2.2) and booted it up. Well the OS recognized it, and offered a FORMAT. I agreed (knowing that SS could reformat it back to 'normal'!) and it took the format correctly AND let me rename it too!! And here's where it got weird...... I copied a system folder to it (took FOREVER to Xfer to the HiMD) AND it BOOTED to it. Slow as Christmas, but it worked :rasp: Thought you'd all get a hoot from that! :laugh: Oh, yeah and STARTUP DISK on OSX (10.3.4) saw it too! :grin: