mshadel

Well, I've packed up my 600D and returned it. As much as I wanted to love the Hi-MD format, I just had too many gripes to support Sony with my consumer dollars. Ultimately Hi-MD proved to be great hardware hopelessly crippled by restrictive software. Well, and a few other problems too... 1. SonicStage is slow, poorly designed, and extremely unreliable. I rebooted my machine dozens of times after SonicSatge crashes. Half the time it wouldn't recognize my 600D when it was plugged in. Often the program would close mid-transfer for no apparent reason. When the software was running, it regularly consumed close to 100 percent of the processor. Even when it wasn't my wife reported seeing SonicStage processes running wild in the process list. There's no excuse for this. Sony has the time and budget to make reliable software. Their priority is clearly DRM enforcement over usability. 2. SonicStage is my only choice to transfer music. There are no 3rd party apps available, no independant developer community, no mac or unix support, and no hope for them in the future. (except for mac support) 3. ATRAC is inadequate. The new ATRAC3+ only comes in 256k, 64k, and 56k. There's no VBR. There's no mono support. There's no compressed lossless. Why? Competing codecs have had these options for years. 4. Hi-MD media is still not yet available. Sure, this problem will be solved in time. But Sony won't say when. Why pay a premium to early-adopt their hardware if I can't use it? Reformatted MDs are cool but not enough. 2 256k albums on one disc is not revolutionary. 5. The 600D feels cheap. The body is made of plastic. The USB port is covered with a rubber plug that stopped fitting snugly after the first week. The player is thick. What's worse, on the $500 top-end models don't allow data transfer from the charging cradle! 6. No upload of personal recordings to a usable format (WAV). Sure, they're promsied a converter for the Fall. Converting to WAV is not rocket science. Waiting for months for something this simple makes me think their software development departments are choked with beaurocracy. But hey, it wasn't all bad. In fact, Hi-MD has some EXCELLENT qualities, such as: 1. 1GB media for around $3/each! They'll be available in stores some day. That is an incredible cost per MB. For comparison, a 1GB CF card costs at least $135. Hi-MD would be a PERFECT replacement for the floppy disc. They're small, rugged, inexpensive, and higher capacity that a CDRW. 2. Excellent battery life, on a regularly available NiMH AA. Apple could learn a lesson from this. Proprietary batteries are a BIG turn off. 3. Good size, durability, and skip protection compared to a portable CD player. Sony has clearly spent some big bucks coming up with a great format. Here's they should do to make Hi-MD ubiquitous rather than a niche market: 1. Keep the DRM for ATRAC, but support non-DRM'd mp3s as well. At this point, mp3 is a standard. All their competetors support it. They need to get over their fear of non-DRM'd music. 2. Allow music to be drag-and-dropped via the Windows (or Mac) Explorer onto MDs for playback in a portable player. 3. Make an inexpensive MD data drive for the PC. Target it for data storage (like the floppy) but allow music to be copied over and played back on the portables. If this ever happened I would be on the streets selling 'I Love MD' T-shirts the next day. 4. License the MD technology to other companies. What if you could use $3 minidiscs as storage in a PDA? In a digital camera? There is a huge amount of potential here. In summary, these last few weeks have made me believe that Sony no longer puts their customers first. When companies get arrogant, they die. I predict that unless they have a major reversal of corporate policy they'll have 1/10th of their current market share in ten years.

[double post, don't know how to delete it...]

Personally I've found SS2.0 to be irritatingenough that I've considered returning my 600D. It's the only software on my computer that crashes on a regular basis. Once it has crashed it will not work reliably until I do a full reboot. On many occasions SS will report that there's no MD present when one is clearly plugged in. The player says it's connected, but SS can't see it. Even if it were very stable there are a lot of features missing: 1. The ability to drag tracks from outside into the program. I would love to drag a folder of WMA's from Explorer straight into SS. As it is now music has to be imported into SS before I can do anything with it. 2. Adding new music to SS is a pain in the ass. I often buy several albums at a time online. I want SS to scan my collection to pick up the new ones. Instead, I am forced to either add each album individually, or re-scan the entire collection, which takes over an hour. 3. There's no good way to determine how many tracks will fit on a disc. Why can't SS tell you the total running time of the tracks you've selected before beginning the transfer? Related to that, I'd like to tweak the list of music I want to transfer before the transfer begins and the CPU slows to a crawl. 4. Selecting a mode for the music transfer is non-intuitive. It should let you select your transfer mode from a simple list, period. 5. SS encodes your music on the fly when you transfer it for the first time. I want to encode my entire library ahead of time so I don't have to wait around when I'm trying to put a disc together quickly. Give us a codec! 6. All my music was FLAC encoded before getting the MD unit. SS can't see it. I had to reencode everything to WMA Lossless in order to use it with SS. SS needs to allow plugins to support different codecs.

Yup, WMA has its own tagging format, but the tags are essentially the same as ID3. They will transfer easily to MP3, ATRAC, or whatever else you use.

I've got a Hi-MD disc next to me with a bunch of music encoded from WMA Lossless originals. It works! It gives the exact same quality as music ripped directly from CD to MD, but without the need for keeping the originals on hand. Putting together a quick mix of music is much easier that way. I used CDEX to rip my original CDs to FLAC. I'll be ripping to WMA Lossless from now on. The FLAC distribution comes with plug-ins for Winamp and Nero. CDEX supports FLAC via command line encoder. Hopefully it will allow ripping straigt to WMA Lossless as well. Fray, you've got the right idea. Delete your mp3's that originated from one of your CDs. Re-rip to a lossless format and be sure to get the tagging right. Lock your CDs in storage. Listen to the lossless files on your computer with winamp or whatever you prefer. Batch encode the whole library to mp3, aac, or whatever you need for your portable players. Burn a CD from the lossless source when you want to take something on the road with you. But first, buy two bigger hard drives- one to hold the data, and one to back it all up! If you lose the lossless originals you'll be in for a lot of re-ripping. When I can do the same with DVDs I'll really be happy!

Thanks for all your comments. I decided to take advantage of Sonic Stage's strong WMA support and convert my FLAC files to WMA Lossless using DBPowerAMP. I'm not a big fan of Microsoft's DRM tainted formats, but it does work well. Music transferred to MD from the lossless original sounds much better than that sourced from mp3. If Sony ever decides to support FLAC (which I seriously doubt) that I can convert everything back to that format again. I'm hopeful that some clever hackers will take advantage of Hi-MD's data drive capability to decode MD's music format and write software to convert and transfer music without the need for Sonic Stage. And maybe the DMCA will get repealed so they won't get dragged through the courts for doing it. Or maybe Sony will release the ATRAC3+ codec so people can transcode using their own software and just use Sonic Stage for the transfer and DRM. Or maybe Sony will release a new firmware that allows drag and drop for music files. Or maybe monkeys will fly out of my... well, you get the picture. Thanks everyone!

Hey Everyone, After a week of lurking I went out and bought a NH600D last night. Minidisc is great! I had an older unit many years ago, but I abandoned the format because titling was such a pain in ass. Come on, titling discs with a jog dial? Ridiculous! The good news is that with USB transfer titling is no big deal. But I have to say, the SonicStage software is by farthe weakest link in the chain. I love the hardware, but the software is absolute crap. But enough ranting. I recently ripped my entire CD collection to the lossless FLAC format. I love it. The music is perfect, it's substantially smaller than WAV, and it includes Vorbis tagging so the song information is all stored with the file. As I buy new CDs I rip them to FLAC and then batch convert to mp3 or whatever format I need to support my various portable players, stereo components, etc. If a new format comes out I can delete the old stuff (keeping the FLACs) and re-encode the whole library to the latest and greatest without disturbing the original CDs. If my house burns down I've got all the original music on a backup drive off site. It's a great system. The problem is, Sony doesn't support FLAC, so I can't transfer music from the digital originals to HiMD without transcoding to some other format first. SS supports WAV, but if I use that all the titling is lost. Does Sonic Stage support lossless WMA? If it did I could transcode everything to that format and be able to transfer from there to ATRAC3+ with near perfect quality. Then I just need to find a WMA Lossless encoder somewhere. Even better would be to find a codec to encode the FLACs directly to MD-compatible OMG files that I could then move over to HiMDs. That way I can encode the entire library ahead of time and avoid having to wait around while SS encodes on the fly. I'd love to hear the techniques others are using to transfer lossless originals to MD with minimal loss in quality. I don't want to pull my discs out of storage or spend hours (days) re-titling everything. If all else fails I suppose I could convert the FLACs to 320kbps VBR mp3s and go from there to MD. That's as close as mp3 gets to lossless. But still, it's far from perfect. mshadel