ksandbergfl

i would think you could get a used MZ-NH600D for a good price... just leave it plugged into the PC... pop your minidiscs in and upload the tracks via Sonicstage.

(satire) http://radio.about.com/library/weekly/aa082603a.htm

You over-analyzed my point. I wasn't advocating a Dell laptop as a recording tool... I was using "a $499 Dell" as a comparison to state the $349 HiMD's are, in my opinion, way over-priced. I was saying, that among the group of musician/studio guys I know -- every single one of them would rather lug along a laptop, Cakewalk or Protools, and maybe an external USB "sound card" for recording "on the go". Not one of them uses a MD for anything other than bootleg recording or perhaps doing rough stereo mixes from a sound board. They all acknowledge MD's place as a useful sound recording tool, but not one of them (except for me) has purchased a HiMD unit. With the new units -- maybe that will change... but I believe the price point has to come down. Way down. If the new fancy-schmancy unit hit the streets at $199, I'd seriously consider running out and buying it today. But, at $349, it's a little too expensive for my tastes. The other angle to my analysis was -- if Sony had only provided PCM recording from the start..... everything would be different. I would even go so far to say that DAT might've never existed... and we all "know" that if Sony had allowed unlimited uploads/transfers from NetMD -- iPod might've never existed either. ;-) Finally -- about the specs. There are many posts around this forum regarding the frequency specs of ATRAC vs. uncompressed PCM. I remember a 17KHz roll-off from somewhere... it may be in the NetMD forum, regarding LP2 or LP4. I could be wrong about the roll-off value, but I don't believe I am wrong about the fact that in the late 80's/early 90's, sound engineers typically avoided the MD because of the lossy ATRAC compression and the relatively poor frequency response. Just my opinions. As a musician, I never ever seriously considered owning a MD until HiMD came out... and then, the main reason I bought one was for the USB Mass Storage option (300MB on a $2 disk, can't beat it!). It wasn't until Sony opened up the PCM recording and file transfers (the release of SS v3.4) that I even considered recording with one. PS: I had a Fostex A8 8-track reel-to-reel for years. It made the greatest, warmest sounding recordings. I loved that thing. I used it up until around 1995-6, when I got my first Cakewalk system. I kept it until 2004, when I sold it on Ebay. It still worked fine -- but the poor thing got crushed in shipping!!!! It broke my heart when the buyer said it arrived in pieces. I still have a Tascam 4-track cassette unit (a 456 I think) sitting around, collecting dust. I won't risk the same fate with that, no matter how much the wife bugs me to sell it! ;-)

the write-protect tab on the disc itself is used to press against a tiny microswitch inside the unit. perhaps the microswitch in your unit is bad? I can imagine that the unit might freak out if it thinks that the switch was flipped right in the middle of playing. have you noticed -- if you stand the unit up (so that the write-protect tab on the disc would be facing up towards the ceiling), does this still happen? You could also try the other way - position the unit so that the write-protect tab is facing down towards the floor. The idea being that maybe a "gravity assist" might help the switch behave better. Another idea -- maybe you have dust or some other gunk in there? Try blowing out the unit with compressed air, in the general vicinity of the write-protect switch. hope that helps.

I don't have an answer for you -- but does anyone know if SonicStage recognizes a DVD-Audio disk? If so, then you might be able to create a "virtual" DVD-Audio disc (instead of CD) and have SonicStage process it from there.

One of the issues I don't see discussed often enough is -- MD historically was never considered a serious audio recording tool, because Sony never allowed true "hi fidelity" PCM stereo recording. I am a musician, and in the late 80's/early 90's, having a digital recorder was considered the "holy grail". MD failed on this point because its best resolution was compressed, lossy 256Kbps ATRAC, with a well-documented hi-frequency shelf of about 17KHz. Musicians,studios, and serious hi-fi aficionados instead adopted DAT and ADAT (an 8-track DAT recorder that used standard VHS video tapes), which recorded music in the same format as CD's (44.1KHz sampling, stereo, 16-bit PCM). Then, when recordable CD's and HD recorders came around, people moved to that platform. MD was left behind. MD did become the standard for field recordings in the broadcast radio industry, and almost every music lover knows that you "need" an MD for recording bootlegs of concerts. But MD was never considered a serious audio recording tool. I don't know if Sony can resurrect MD, now that they finally support uncompressed PCM recording. I have contacted every musician/studio friend I know, and the response has been less than enthusiastic... The guys I know are content to lug around a laptop with their studio software (Cakewalk, Logic, etc) instead. Especially considering you can get a new laptop from Dell for $499, and a top-of-the-line HiMD is a whopping $349... I wouldn't expect to see much sales of the new HiMD unless the price drops below $200.

I've never used iTunes, but I would think as long as the AAC codec is installed on your PC, you should be able to use a freeware tool like MENCODER to directly "rip" the iTunes file to either WAV or MP3. Someone who knows how to use Microsoft's GraphEdit could probably rip AAC to MP3 pretty easily too. You could also use something like AudioGrabber or TotalRecorder and real-time capture/convert the iTunes song to a WAV or MP3 (ie, play the song using iTunes, while recording your sound card's output using AudioGrabber).

"Other companies, however, will not be going at all. Shoko Yanagisawa, a spokeswoman for Sony, said the company will not be at CeBIT due to a "strategic decision after weighing the costs and returns." She said CeBIT is primarily a telecommunications event and Sony decided it would be more appropriate if Sony Ericsson, its mobile-phone joint venture with Sweden's LM Ericsson, takes part. " http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/2006...t-preview_x.htm

No, that doesn't seem rude at all.... but read my post again, I already have a recorder - my PC. ;-) Yes, a tool like SimpleBurner to "rip/burn" a list of MP3 files to HiMD is exactly what I want. <sigh.....>

What is Sony's relationship to other manufacturer's like Sharp or Kenwood? Is there a chance that Sony might license/sell HiMD technology to someone else? Would anyone else want it? Surely some company out there is eager to build and sell a few thousand HiMD car decks for the hard-core HiMD'ers... if Sony would just let them!

Because the MZ-NH600D does not have a line-in!!!!!!! If I would've bought a HiMD unit with a line-in, I wouldn't be asking the question. ;-) SimpleBurner kinda does what I want... I am curious if I can find a way (if there is one) to feed SimpleBurner a list of MP3 files instead of CD tracks. (yes i know about the "CD image" trick, but that's not what I want to do). I simply want to -- #1 connect my HiMD to my PC; #2 record from cassette with the PC (via PC's line-in) to MP3 files; #3. have MP3 songs AUTOMATICALLY ripped/burned to my HiMD player (thus getting around the inconvenience of manually starting up SS, selecting files, and copying them to the HiMD).

Ok, so I do a lot of recording on my PC. Old cassettes and albums, internet radio, etc etc. I usually record to 192Kbps MP3 using a tool called AudioGrabber. To get these songs onto my HiMD, I need to fire up SonicStage. I have to select the desired MP3 files, then SonicStage converts them to ATRAC and copies them to my HiMD player. What I want to know -- can SonicStage be used to record from a PC's line-in, while ripping/copying the music directly to my HiMD? If so, all I would have to do is - plug in my HiMD to my PC, fire up SonicStage and click on "record"... the songs would already be on my HiMD when recording was finished. If SonicStage isn't able to do this -- then is there a way to programmatically (via an API) call up the ripping/burning functions of SonicStage, so I don't have to do it manually? It would be nice to pass an array of MP3 file names to a SonicStage API, and have SonicStage rip/copy the files to the HiMD without user input. Thanks! Keith Melbourne, FL

This is an old topic, I know. But I finally got around to doing a test. HiMD "records" MP3's in mass-storage mode just fine. It has no trouble keeping up. As a matter of fact, it can "record" to a WAV file (uncompressed 44.1KHz PCM, 10MB/min) just fine too, although you can hear the HiMD disc spinning up a lot more often. For my test: I used a 2.2GHz PC with Windows XP. I have a Sony MZ-NH-600D with a 1GB disc. I connected to Launchcast, selected a channel. To record, I used AudioGrabber (http://www.audiograbber.com-us.net). I setup AudioGrabber to save the "Wave Mix" directly to MP3 using the LAME MP3 encoder. My MP3 settings were 192Kbps "high quality". My output directory for MP3's was my E: drive (the HiMD). A 4-minute song took up roughly 6MB. The HiMD had no trouble keeping up with the incoming data. I recorded 5 songs in a row, all with no problems. Test 2 was the same, except I set AudioGrabber to record to WAV instead. A 4-minute song took roughly 40MB. I recorded 4 songs in a row before stopping, all were fine. Summary: HiMD would work OK as a "mass storage" device for recording output from a device like the device from AudioMasters in this topic.

In case you haven't yet -- upgrade your SonicStage to v3.4. Versions prior to v3.4 only allowed you one try at uploading your PCM recordings... if your PC crashed in the middle of uploading or whatever, you were out of luck. I believe that with v3.4, this restriction has been removed and you can upload PCM recordings as many times as you want.

Actually, this device could be thought of as a "digital audio input" for the HiMD. the Ikey site says it records in MP3 format too, max rate 256Kbps. I think the HiMD could handle that, for sure. 1.4Mbps WAV might be a stretch, tho. HiMD can copy ~1GB data to a disc in about 30 minutes.... ~33MB/min. 256Kbps is only 2MB/minute.... 1.4Mbps is about 10MB/min.

minidisc is quite prevalent in the broadcast radio industry. as long as an adequate # of radio stations still use/desire the format, Sony will be making MD units. Although most likely only high-end "pro" units.

How do you use Nero to create the boot disk? As far as I can tell, Nero can only create a bootable CD? How do you make Nero write a boot image to a USB mass media device? thanks

Has anyone booted anything from HiMD yet? Just wondering....

You haven't mentioned if you've studied Windows WAV file format or not. LPCM is a sampling method, the LPCM file in the HiMD is likely the "raw" samples. WAV is a file format that specifies how to store audio data... Sony's WAV extraction would take the LPCM off of HiMD and CONVERT it into the Microsoft WAV file format. My point being that comparing LPCM to WAV isn't necessarily apples-to-apples. WAV data isn't the "raw samples" from your sound card, the sound data is re-organized into a file format that computer programs (not D/A converters) can read.

I am wondering if maybe Sony licensed their firmware MP3 decoder from somewhere else.... I doubt that Sony would've spent the time writing their own. They probably licensed the source code from a 3rd party, compiled it for HiMD, and burned it into the chips. Perhaps the reason it seems that RH10's have the problem while the other units don't -- maybe they burnt the RH10 PROM's first.. discovered the problem and fixed it.... and then burned the PROM's for the other units. I have worked in the contract assembly business in the past, and I've seen this kind of thing many times. If Sony found a minor "bug" in the firmware after burning 100,000 chips and soldering them onto 100,000 main boards, they certainly would not have halted release of the units. just speculation on my part.

#1.> There is no point in doing a USB sniff for any DRM info. The DRM logic is built into the firmware of the HiMD BIOS. Someone would have to reverse engineer the BIOS chip in order to learn how the "hidden" areas of the minidisc are managed. When your HiMD is plugged into your PC and you click "play" from SonicStage, the HiMD itself is decrypting the OMA internally and simply sending over the decrypted PCM bytes to your soundcard. #2.> Even if two PC's had the exact same keys, you still couldn't swap OMA files between them without a lot of other work too. Part of the DRM mechanism is a "procfile" (look for a folder on your PC called PROCFILE). Everytime your OMA is played, transfered, edited, this procfile is updated with the current status. If the procfile is missing or corrupt, your PC won't play the OMA. Additionally, Sony also puts some procfile-related info in the SonicStage database (look for a file on your PC called MtData.mdb). Even if you figured out how to copy an OMA file and its related procfile (the easy part), you still would have to update the SonicStage database accordingly (the part I haven't figured out yet). In short, for an OMA file to be transferred between PC's, SonicStage would have to think that the OMA was generated on that PC.... In my opinion the only way to make OMA's truly "portable" is to reverse-engineer Sony's ATRAC codec. An open-source OMA player. I wonder if it can be done.

$550, that's steep. 3 months after these come out, the street price will be $300-350

This website says the USB connection is USB 2.0 -- is that true? Can you download to this HiMD unit faster than the 1st gen units? http://www.mobilemag.com/content/100/337/C3798/ Article does not mention -- does it play video too? WMV? Mpeg1? This is a cool device.

Where are all the 1GB HiMD blanks? I can find regular minidiscs just about anywhere - Target, Radio Shack, Best Buy. No 1GB's anywhere except online. What's the deal?

Saying that the HiMD supports WMA is not the same as saying Windows Media Player supports the HiMD. The original post was about using WMP10's playlists.. and if it's possible to get them onto the HiMD. If WMP10 supported HiMD as a "portable audio device", then this would be possible. But, WMP10 has no support for Sony devices. If you want to get music onto your HiMD, you have to use SonicStage. SonicStage will, even now, "support" WMA and MP3 -- import a WMA/MP3 file into your SonicStage library, convert it to ATRAC, and copy it to your HiMD player. That's what they mean in the article you quoted.