aeriyn

Oi, this guy can't get it through his head. Hey, what dex is saying is true. Only pulse code modulation formats have bit depths. It is true that DVD-A, which is a type of PCM and NOT compressed btw, is 24/192. Super Audio CD is not PCM at all, but DSD (Direct Stream Digital) and doesn't have a bit depth because... well, it's not PCM. If it's not pulse code modulation, it doesn't have a bit depth. Thank you. :sleep:

The reason your Guns N Roses album is recorded at low levels (probably 89dB gain or lower) is that back in those days, they didn't bit-push the hell out of CDs just to make them as loud as possible. Be happy; your quiet album almost certainly sounds loads better than some of the brand new Redbook audio being released here in 2004. When I rip CDs to compressed audio (for other devices besides MD) I had started using MP3Gain to lower the gain from what it usually is (on newer CDs it tends to be very close to 100dB!) to around 89dB. With MD this wasn't as feasable due to the low output power of MD portables' headphone amplifiers. With the iPod, however... :laugh:

Oi, iTunes Store sucks too, then. Anyhow, none of the music I listen to is on either Connect or iTunes. If Sony would've made mora.jp available to the US, then quite a lot of the music I listen to would be obtainable that way. Well, I think Avex Trax might have a deal with Sony, but I doubt Toshiba EMI does... :rasp:

Oi, NetMD is basically legacy MDLP with (very limited) USB transfer support. It's the same as normal MD; those fast transfer speeds are based on real-time transfers. E.g., the MZ-N10 will transfer LP2 tracks at 32x realtime... so an hour of music would theoretically take two minutes to copy (minus all the TOC edits). Hi-MD is sort of like an upgrade to NetMD; basically the same thing, using an improved (debatable) codec and a larger media size. There's support for transferring your recordings made live from the Hi-MD unit to the PC, but at the moment UselessStage likes to randomly destroy tracks to be uploaded to the PC. There are workarounds, however; search the forum for methods to get around Sony's software ineptitude. As for storage capacity... standard 80min MDs hold ~160mb. Standard MDs formatted to Hi-MD mode hold 305mb, and Hi-MD discs hold very close to 1gb. CD-R/RW holds, as you should know, 700mb (80mins of linear PCM audio). :rasp: AFAIK, DAT and DCC I believe are not denoted in byte storage, but in runtime, and I think DATs are 90mins each, while there might be shorter and longer ones. DCC I have no clue.

Um, LP2 is ~132kbps ATRAC3. Hi-LP is 64kbps ATRAC3+.

I have an Amiga 500 in my bedroom next to my PC. :laugh: It's in a box at the moment, because the 120mb hard drive I had with it crashed a few years ago and finding a replacement is nearly impossible, I'm just waiting until I find someone getting rid of a lot of old Amiga stuff. It was my first computer... I got it for Christmas when I was five years old. I had some good times with that thing... good times. Lots of playing Gold Box AD&D games and fooling around with the Amiga programming language. (I don't remember a thing about it either. :grin: ) I wouldn't sell the Amiga for anything, even though I don't use it anymore. It's one of the few things I still have from when I was a little girl. And if you want my honest confession about why I chose to abandon MD... well, it wasn't the hassle or the DRM or UselessStage or anything like that. It was that my home audio system ruined me. :laugh: I wanted to be able to use better headphones, and if you use the DS8 without a remote, the chrome part on the headphone jack doesn't ground properly and it introduces a lot of static. I'd been wanting an iPod anyhow, so it seemed like a good time to sell off my legacy MD equipment before Hi-MD and other DAPs made them totally worthless. And off it all went, for so little too. At least, however, I got a bit more than I paid for all of it.

Yeah, minimal depending on the quality of the A/D converter in the recorder. In a portable recorder, I doubt the A/D converter would be around the same as the optical input in terms of signal fidelity. As I've heard elsewhere, there are some folks on this forum that believe MD recorders always resample, even if the source samplerate is the same. It makes sense as to explain why the Hi-MD optical input is not exactly "bit-perfect," and is a lot better explanation than "1411kbps ATRAC3+." *roflmao*

Oi, you can't get UselessStage 2.2 from connect.com?

Erm, Connect only offers tracks in LP2? WTF... if I'm going to pay to download a track, it better be in farking lossless or WAV. I think I'll just buy CDs the old fashioned way. eBay. :rasp:

Sometimes I get the feeling that MD is Sony's abandonware. They are not doing the format justice as a recording medium. If anything, it's being marketed as a DAP, which is not Hi-MD's true place. An iPod is a ten thousand times better DAP. Hi-MD, however, is the only inexpensive, small, easy to use and high quality recording device... so why the hell can't Sony figure that out? Only the niche users actually use MD as DAPs. Most users are going to be amateur recordists and musicians. A lot of times MD reminds me of Amiga Computers. Great products that died slow painful deaths from poor marketing.

Dex is right. Searching by the title of a thread would be useless unless you knew the exact title, and told the search engine to search for exact name only.

Goodbye MD! Dunno exactly who bought all of you pieces and such, but hopefully they'll enjoy you and not become incredibly frustrated. =P Hello pink iPod Mini (with pictures) coming soon. =P

O.o A... coffeepot?

Oi, why not? Take pictures of my rig, and of me with my rig. XD

Expect pictures soon! ^^

It's in the "Find Your Minidisc" subforum now because I moved it. :rasp: It was in the Hi-MD forum.

It's better than my Head-Fi avatar; they limit avatar size to 75x75, and that's not big enough to make this image look decent, so I just used a random redheaded anime girl for head-fi. :rasp:

What I don't understand is what you're comparing this to. If ATRAC is tweaked to sound better on MD, then what does it sound worse on? There can't be anything, because nothing else but Sony products uses ATRAC. For instance, I can say an iPod playing back MP3 sounds better than a Zen Nomad. Both units can play MP3s. But I can't say an MD player sounds better than an iPod playing ATRAC, because nothing but MD and Sony DAPs use ATRAC. Of course they are. But there's no reference from which to say an MD sounds better than when using ATRAC, because an iPod can't use ATRAC. A Zen Nomad can't use ATRAC. A Rio Karma can't use ATRAC. So what, pray tell, is the MD tweaked to run better than, if there's no other DAPs that use ATRAC?! Oi! Sadly, this is true; they don't record music like they used to. However, I avoid most of the bit-pushing by virtue of the type of music I listen to; J-Rock and J-Pop, and Asian-mastered CDs tend to have a greater dynamic range than US-made albums. I guess the Japanese still understand that volume doesn't equal better sound. :laugh:

When I rip discs to my hard drive, I tend to use a program like MP3Gain to normalize everything (album gain) to 89dB to attempt to get rid of the worst of the clipping. It usually works. :rasp:

Thanks, dex. :rasp: Welcome to the forums, n00b. :laugh: Moving to correct forum. Next time, try to post in the proper place, kthnx. :happy:

Moving to correct forum...

Thank you, dex. T.T No one wanted to listen to me on this subject.

There was once such a device (MDM-1) but it is old, impossible to find and expensive. If you wish to use MD as a storage media, I suggest you look elsewhere. MD is a magneto-optical system and thus is very, very slow. It would take upwards of 45 minutes to copy 1gb of information to a Hi-MD player.

Uninstall SonicState according to the FAQ and install the newest version, which you can download from connect.com. If the problem persists, reply to this thread. :happy:

Just a few dollars? Waaaaii, link me, link me! I bought my E2cs for ~70USD. The cheapest I've seen E3cs for have been more than double that price!