Michael_Walker

Thanks very much! ! I must say that over the past year, this forum has been at least twenty times more helpful than SonyCorp could ever dream of being... Its bedtime here anyway, so i will try the download :-)

WELL.. if its not SONY's fault, pray tell whose fault IS IT??? :-) I tell ya - this sonicstage software has been flakey from DAY ONE for me! I was able to install 2.0 today on a nearly identical machine (same OS & patches) and it worked on the first try (although it was the same story on the notebook im currently having all this grief with, so im not holding my breath!). But sonicstage 2.0 on the second machine is not all GLEE either, first thing i did today was ask it to play a recording from one of my MDs - which it DID - until about halfway through where it FROZE the machine... something that has NEVER ever happened to this machine in 3 years! I had to do a hardware reset :-( Im just debating if i should TRY and upgrade to 2.3 now on THIS machine.. But i STILL need to get the friggin thing working on my notebook I do appreciate that you are trying to help :-)) But can you honestly say you have ever seen a more poorly-designed and implemented piece of software in your entire life?? Anyhow - where can i get an installer for sonicstage 1.5?? my CD only comes with sonicstage 2.0...

AMEN to that, dex... i for one will NEVER buy another piece of sony hardware as long as i live. SONY NEEDS TO GET WITH THE PROGRAM - its the friggin 21st century, and the name of the game is now "CUSTOMER SERVICE"

i can live with the copy-protection, my beef is that SONY are such twits at writing software. I have already lost some "priceless" recordings due to the Sonicstage UPLOAD GLITCH... and now my sonicstage doesnt work AT ALL and sony seems to be in no hurry whatsoever to assist me

an ALTERNATIVE to SonicStage??? I'm all ears...

whats gonna kill Hi-MD is SONICSTAGE and sony's infinitely crappy support of it. I use the Hi-MD (600) for recording and i am quite happy with the unit, despite the obvious limitations of pissing around with workarounds to get my recordings out it. But SONICSTAGE software that mysteriously stops working every few weeks, wont uninstall cleanly, and cant be downloaded as an installer package ( i have to download 40 megs EVERY TIME, no thrills on my slow connection ) that REALLY SUCKS!!!!!!!!!! Too bad SONY doesnt give a damn, eh?

NO - i applied the patch for that already! it makes no difference... i tried the 2.3 'upgrade' - it did NOTHING to solve my problem either. I have a USELESS $200 HI-MD paperweight now... Sony are just being irresponsible PRICKS about it.. as soon as they found out i have a "600" ( not a 600"D") SONY USA claimed they 'couldnt' help me!! YEAH RIGHT.. as if it has ANYTHING to do with the unit. its their friggin SOFTWARE that is all f***ED up.

downloading all 40 megs of 2.3 ( no party on my slow connection!) was a BIG waste of time.. "it didnt work" even WORSE, it seems to have crippled my machine FOR GOOD.. now i cannot even get 2.0 to install properly FROM THE CD ( despite uninstall/cleanup per the FAQ here) does anybody know how to get ALL the previous MD drivers OUT, and how to cleanly install working ones?? (win2000)

well, win2000server SP4 with 512 megs of RAM 2.0 was running fine "for a while" until today i went to use it and the HI-MD driver was TOAST i just did a FULL CLEANUP ( as per NetMD FAQ) and carefully reinstalled only to find the same problem... this software is MEGA FRUSTRATING - now i cant even get 2.0 to install from the CD!!!! well it all installs "perfectly" - up until the time i plug in the MD unit.. then the driver flakes out with some obscure error message ( after spending 2 minutes searching for the driver it apparently loads the WRONG DRIVER and then complains it cant bind or configure with it properly) I've been into add/remove hardware, and deleted all the hidden "NETMD" and "Sony USB STORAGE" drivers (to no avail) There is something REALLY F***KED UP with the sony driver installation.. i tried running the standalone driver installer, ( it did exited without a peep the first couple of times, but the most recent time it reported succes in installing the drivers - of course, it STILL DOESNT WORK) and just pointing at the OBVIOUS driver folder on the CD doesnt allow it to FIND them.. even though one of the INF files clearly contains my device (NH-600) im up to about 5 uninstall/ installs inthe last several hours... im just about ready to take a sledgehammer to my MD recorder

yes 2.1 KILLED MY COMPUTER TOO... (win2000) it seemed to install OK, and then even worked the first time i tried it.. BUT the second time i opened it - it was HOOPED.. i had to uninstall everything and put 2.0 in from the CD. now the WAV file converter insists i re-install 2.1 again! ARRGH! has anyone managed to get 2.1 or 2.2 running ok? my machine is running win2000 server, BTW

- Do you like it? If so, why? YES! it records flawlessly, and on playback its extremely shock-resistant. Thats all i ask for! - Is it a sufficient improvement on MD to survive in the current market? for me, it is.. i resisted buying an MD recorder for YEARS, now i have one! - What has it got over HDD players in general that swung you to buy one? cheap, removeable media! (archival use is important for me, i make plenty of live recordings of my band) Did you compare before you bought, or was it more or less an automatic purchase because you were a past MD user? i shopped around a LOT, and never owned an MD before - Would you recommend it to your friends looking for 'an MP3 player' bearing in mind it's limitations? And why? sure, its simply the most cost effective removeable MO drive going.. that means a lot to my friends, since they all have thousands of hours of music - enough to fill multiple hard drives! - Did Sony treat you right? sure, guess they did okay Did your shop treat you right? they were lame, but all russian shops are lame Did the shop try to mislead you in any way about Hi-MD? no they knew less about it than i did.. - What in your opinion could Sony do to raise the public awareness of Hi-MD? (Bearing in mind that the ads aren't having much impact) they could start by making the Hi-MD media more widely available :wacky:

hmm.. some musings: 20 gigs doesnt take long to fill up - i think a lot of "serious" fans of portable music will want to have more than that... its not unlikely for people to want to have 100 or more 1Gig MDs filled with hi-fi tracks on hand. I have at least 1000 hours of music in my personal collection, and it would be nice to have all of that available to choose from when i go for a bike ride. Sure - its gonna take a while to even GET some 1 gig discs... but im eventually gonna fill up a LOT of them! The other thing that comes to mind is that MD has primarily always been a RECORDING format. I dont think a puny 20 gig hard drive is going to affect the desireability of removable 1 gig magneto-optical media as a handy recording and archival solution.

well, its a FAT drive, and yes, the windows defragger actually does defrag it. Mine wasnt very fragmented ( 1 file with 4 fragments) but i guess a 1 gig drive with lots of songs added and removed could get pretty fraggy over a period of time... Keep in mind ( like all disk operations) its takes CONSIDERABLY longer than a hard drive! Probably Diskeeper will do a better job Incidentally, i noticed today there is about a 5 second "writing data" delay after you stop recording. (during which time you cannot do anything) For our gigs i will just leave it running, i think!

Its Blue (the "LEE" model).. actually a bit more blue than most of the pictures indicate, its sort of royal metallic blue. Today i loaded SonicStage on my ancient PIII-650 notebook, and gave it a spin. For starters, it took quite along time to install, decided it wanted to update my DirectX first (i think i had 8.something on there). Then i was wondering why it seemed to be stuck at 30% for so long, so i moved a couple windows and found one of those "are you sure you want to install an unsigned driver" dialog boxes underneath! It would have sat there ALL DAY if i hadnt done that... For some reason i got about 12 of those in a row as it was installing... you would think a big company like SONY could manage to sign their friggin drivers (sheesh) Anyway, it all works pretty much as advertised. ( i think) First thing i did was add about 3 dozen of my favorite MP3s to 'my library" so i could transfer them to the MD for playback. Transferring to MD took about 30 seconds to 1 minute per song (they were 2 to 5 minute songs) about a dozen of them were on a drive across our LAN, and it insisted on copying them to the local hard drive before adding them to the library. But that worked OK.. Next i popped in a half-dead Alkaline AA and headed across town. I stuffed the MD player in my pants pocket, and was very pleased that the playback never skipped once the whole trip, not even when i ran to catch the subway car. When i arrived at our rehearsal space downtown i slapped it on our mixer output for a few minutes while we did a quick jam as the drummer and guitarist tested out some brand new gear (new midi kick drum trigger pad, and Vox ToneLab, respectively). I just left it on auto-level ( AGC) to see what it would do. I must say it worked very well! No audible 'pumping', the levels stayed steady at about -12 , and sound was noticeably crystal clear, even though i wasnt recording PCM, only ATRAC3+ (256-ish). When i got home, i just fired up SoundForge (my favorite audio editor), and recorded the tracks in real-time (using the soundcards 'mix input' ) as i played them back from sonicstage. I later tried importing them into the library, which it did fine, (and pretty quick - about 5X realtime) but there seemed to be no facility for exporting them to another format. No huge crisis i guess, since it seems that the realtime dub was picking up the stream in digital form (i could not detect any audible noise to suggest it had gone through a D/A conversion...) Next time i will try some PCM recording. I had a bit of fun today looking at HMA files on the 'removable hard drive' and i even defragged the MD, just for the heck of it :smile:

finally, a better look at the ferrite beads, and my test MD (which formatted nicely to 269 megs free ) I'm going to install the SonicStage when i get home this evening, and see how eveything works (including PCM recording) over the next couple days...

a look inside ( not much to see... )

coughing up the test disk...

back view - battery cover is reasonably sturdy, with captive lid

peek-a-boo! (dual-purpose optical and 1/8" stereo minijack provides digital AND analogue input)

side view (L-R) headphones unidentified 4-pin header ( for a remote, maybe?) analogue/digital input jack USB ( under rubber flap)

the very useful AC adapter input (i gotta go buy one of them things!)

its smaller than i thought it would be ( this is a good thing)

got it! :grin: here is what i got... The unit, USB cable, SonicStage 2.0 CD, a cheap set of headphones, 3 extra ferrite beads ( for optional line & power cables) and manuals in about 8 languages (happily - one is in ENGLISH) NO MD, and NO battery :rasp: reading the manual was pretty obtuse.. actually its one of those manuals you have to sit down and read - the index isnt much help. I did manage to figure out how to put a battery and disc in it, and with a little peeking through the manual discovered how to initiate recording, and set the input level. So i recorded a one minute sample through the line input. I was a bit surprised to find the same 1/8th mini jack doubles as both analogue AND digital input.. i was thinking it would be an OPTICAL SPDIF, but apparently its just the copper wire version? !! WAITAMINUTE !! - according to the manual, it IS an optical input too (just not the standard square SPDIF connector i am used to) It DOES say "OPTICAL" right on the case, too :wink: The teeny tiny controls were a bit disconcerting, it took me a minute to figure out that the "nib' in the center of the jog wheel is not only a switch, but a "joystick" too. :wacky: Once i figured that out, i was able to turn up the volume! I made the test recording in "Hi-SP" mode (so I could play around with SonicStage easier) and (through those cheap headphones, at least) its impossible to distinguish between the source and the copy. Not Too Shabby! some closeup pics to follow...

THAT just made my day :grin: Actually what would REALLY make my day is if SONY actually delivers the Hi-MD recording unit they promised to deliver this morning...

hmmm - SEMANTICS! then those bastards at sony are very clever liars... "oh, i will pretend you mean "what sony says by the word editing", when really i know damn well you mean something else"... reading the MANUAL, i now see that in sonicstage you can do what they call "EDITING" - basically just splitting big files into smaller ones, or combining small ones into a big one ( nothing but a glorified playlist function, basically) and if the manual I am reading is correct, then this is the most crippled device EVER - you cannot convert MP3s directly into an ATRAC to upload - you first have to burn your MP3s to an audio CD - and then rip em from THERE? Am i Missing something??