dex Otaku

One thing to add, too .. as with many, most if not all of my editing is done with headphones. The mastering [if you can even call it that with logitech z680s, which are light years away from being decent nearfields] is done over speakers.

I tend to combine binaural with non-binaural recordings. My assumption is that nearly everyone who will hear anything I edit will be listening on speakers, though I do also usually tell them to try listening with good headphones to get the full effect. While most things I work on are plain stereo, my favourite setup to edit for is currently 5.1 surround. It can be quite challenging, and also very fulfilling. The last concert recording I made had two versions - a stereo and a surround version. Since I have two HiMD recorders, I used one to record the feed off the board [which I was mixing] and the other with a friend's MS-907 mid/side stereo mic to record the crowd. With some filtering on the crowd recording the surround version is quite .. convincing, shall we say. That was my first [albeit far less than ideal] foray into quad recording. I tend to fantasise about working with Ambisonic recordings as well.

The main reason I don't use WMA lossless [i use WavPack and FLAC in combination for different destinations] is because SS is the only program I use that can handle it. Not even Sound Forge can encode WMA lossless [i use the Sony/Sonic Foundry editors all the time, but I have to say I hate their file format support: no lossless formats other than Sony's old PCA, which is incredibly slow to encode/decode, and no add-on format filters that I'm aware of].

lotfb!

Low Volta: This is normal for an EQ like this; the lowest and highest bands are not shelving filters, they are notch filters just like the rest. The net effect of lowering all bands will be a wide cup-shaped curve with peaks at the very bottom and top [and possibly bumps where the bands overlap, depending on how high the Q of each filter is]. Chris G: You must have pretty strange hearing to find HiLP and HiSP to be similar. The difference to my ears, even EQ'd, is night and day. But hey, whatever cranks your engine.

d'oh!

Pressing the menu key wakes up the display.

I don't know about using -more- power if you have quick mode disabled. This would really depend on how often you use your player, and how often you put it in full-stop mode and take it out again. I suspect that this might be the case for people who use their player very often, and make frequent stops/starts, similar to how turning off and restarting a car very often is more wasteful of petrol [and potentially damages its battery through acid stratification]. My personal pet theory is that if you use your player sporadically [sometimes it's days between uses for me] then keeping quick mode on might actually help keep your battery healthy by having a regulated low rate of discharge, similar to using a battery conditioner. That's my pet theory, though, and may be completely out of left field as I'm definitely not a battery expert. Again though, even if that's correct to any degree, what is most healthy for your battery really depends on how often and for how long you use your player, as well as how often you charge it and by what method. RE: display modes/power consumption, my Rh10 gets very decent battery life with just the standard gumstick, though I do usually carry the sidecar with a fresh AA in it as well as a backup [especially if I might spontaneously decide to record something]. The difference between the display being always on or auto off is notiecable but not as much as one might think; I'd expect battery life to be about 3/4 - 4/5 with always on compared to auto off. I tend to always put it in "always on" when recording so that the meters never shut off, and I can always see the display without ever having to press any buttons.

Look up SCMS on wikipedia when their servers stop reporting errors. That's Serial Copy Management System.

I would also prefer spheric over a disc. This technique [in general] is better for making recordings that are bound for loudspeaker playback. The "true" binaural method [with 180 degree angular difference between mics] sounds good with headphones but can produce weird results over speakers. Forward-facing elements also produce fewer directional artifacts when put through matrix decoding [a la Dolby Surround]. Binaural [180-degree] recordings when decoded this way send anything that is close to the mics and directly to the side straight to the back channel; the jecklin disc or spherical baffle helps with this somewhat but not completely. I would like to try a setup like Aaron Ximm of quietamerican.org uses someday. I'd also like to try 3-channel recording with dual cardioids and a figure-of-8 element, for quadraphonic decoding. Ultimately, I'd like to experiment with Ambisonics. In the meantime, I'm still impressed by the results that can be achieved with my SP-TFB-2s or other stereo omni setups.

Generally, the spaced-pair method uses a recommended distance of 17cm, about the same distance as that between a human's ears. Cangt say I've used an actual jecklin disc, but I have made similar things myself out of various materials at hand and one does make a difference when using spaced omnis. [The last one I made was a bad-burned DVD-R with felt stretched over it, and an alligator clip screwed to one edge so it could be attached to things. The rest of the "mic mount" consisted of a large lump of plastiscene, two backplane brackets from a PC, and a couple more alligator clips with rubber boots on them that my mics could be attached to simply by inserting their plastic hook-mounts [sP-TFB-2s] into the boots. It actually worked quite well for something that was improvised in under 5 minutes.]

I only have 2 1GB discs. At $12.99 locally, this is outside of my usual budget for expendables [noting that my income is such that I usually spend half or more of most months without food].

Which one? IMO, you already appear to have said it in your conversation with the incompetent Sony support rep - the module that decodes OMA. Does normal playback within SS have the same noise/distortion issues? Does trying to copy with a proxy driver like Total Recorder [when playing from SS] have the same issue? Does trying to copy tracks directly from a source recording on HiMD with HiMDRenderer have the same issue? Just for sh*ts and giggles, have you tried any of the following: * reinstalling directx * removing/reinstalling sound card drivers * disabling/removing any proxy drivers [i.e. total recorder] present on the system * disabling/removing all but baseline system audio codecs These are stabs in the dark, admittedly, but at least somewhat educated ones. The distortion and noise issues would [iMO] have to be constrained somewhere within the audio drivers and/or APIs, and would most likely be something related to Sony's drivers, not something else - though it's worth trying some of the above [and anything similar you can think of] to see if the issue might be one chunk of software that's allergic to another for some random reason. In any case, as has been demonstrated and discussed by other users here recently, you can remove DRM from your own recorded tracks in SS's library without transcoding them, meaning that even if your SS library backup fails, a copy of the "optimized files" folder should still contain usable versions [i.e. without DRM] of all your tracks. Lastly, if you had been using WAV export and/or HiMDRenderer successfully before, why didn't you back up the totally DRM-free tracks and thereafter completely ignore SS's copy? You obviously know better than to trust SS's library as something that is either reliable or trustworthy in a long-term sense, so .. why did you apparently ignore what you already knew? [Don't take that too hard, it's not a personal criticism, just a question.]

Personally, what this would come down to for me is whether I needed backward-compatible realtime recording or not. If I needed SP mode on location [and didn't care about not being able to upload], then I'd go with the NH900. If I didn't, I'd probably go with the RH910. That said, I'm very happy having both an NH700 and RH10.

Both the RH10 and RH910 have a metal front that has transparent plastic over almost all of it. Look in the reviews forum for people's opinions [including] on the build quality. Yes. Sort of. Depending on what region you buy the unit from, you'll get different remotes with most of Sony's units. Generally speaking, the most generic-possible remote is sold with units in North America, and the better remotes with displays are sold with Japanese models. Look carefully at the details of what you're getting from where. The main differences: * the RH10 and RH910 support MP3 playback without transcoding * both also have a function that will list files on your HiMD [i have never had a use for this, myself] * The display on the RH10, obviously * The NH900 can record in MD/LP modes; you can make truly backward-compatible MDs with it by recording in realtime to SP, LP2, and LP4 modes; note that none of these modes are uploadable via USB from any existing portable The "difference" as it can be referred to -always- contains the bulk of audible artifacting from any lossy stereo compression algorithm. This applies equally to MP3, AAC, ATRAC in all its incarnations, AC3, and literally every other lossy format you can think of. As to the differences between SP and HiSP, many have shown a preference for SP, primarily because it's a more mature codec. Both have their pros and cons, but in all honesty, the vast majority of people [who also find that 128kbps MP3 is transparent to their ears] would never be able to detect the difference between them except in the most glaringly obvious of cases [such as the infamous castinets sample used to show how poorly a codec responds to hard transients]. I have used both SP and HiSP for recording and find that hardware-encoded HiSP's quality is usually more than sufficient for my requirements. The difference between the two is very minor. The biggest difference in my books is that self-made HiSP recordings can be uploaded from any HiMD portable, whereas SP mode recordings cannot be uploaded [via USB] using any existing consumer equipment, portable or not.

Gapless works if: * you rip directly from CD to atrac/3/plus [which normally handles gaplessness fine], and * you don't transcode those rips *at all* I have also ripped CDs as PCM and transcoded to atrac3plus with no ill effect; others have reported problems doing this. Hence the above "recommendation". Some users have reported problems with SS 3.3 not keeping trackmarks in the right places, or gaps showing up for no reason, and a variety of other strange things that I've yet to see happen with any version of SS here on my end. Gaplessness [assuming you're encoding to a format that supports it natively, such as all of the variants of atrac/3/plus] depends more on the source you're encoding from than anything else. MP3s don't generally conform to the exact framelength followed by CDs, so there's nearly always padding at the end of tracks that makes gapless playback impossible if they're played straight. Some programs are getting more intelligent about this, such as encoders that include info on the actual tracklength and players that either use that data or simply round down to the nearest 588-sample frame [forcing tracks to conform to CD frame lengths]. I have a few complaints about how SS works in general and a number about the design of its interface, but it's come a long way since v2.1 [the first I used]. Like kurisu and a few others here, I'm rather meticulous about maintaining my system. I have never actually had any installation-related problems with any version of SS, never lost a database, &c. I did experience the upload-corruption bug with earlier versions, but haven't had any problems like that in a long time [and have uploaded literally over 1,000 tracks since the last time it happened]. That said, I still limit my uses of SS to downloading MP3s to my RH10, HiSP tracks to my NH700, and uploading recorded tracks from either. I don't maintain a large database of tracks in SS primarily because OpenMG's DRM makes doing so highly unpractical. I basically refuse to remain stuck inside the DRM loop on my computer, though in all honesty not being able to copy tracks back off the player easily doesn't bother me; I'll always have DRM-free originals as legally-owned CDs or files of various formats that do not incorporate DRM to use as a source for making new copies if need be. I'm babbling at this point, though.

Ah, well. At the least, DRM is broken within the closed chain of a single SS installation. An interesting twist on this, if you think about it, is that full "fair use" has now been re-enabled in the process, even if there is generation loss to consider.

Having finally downloaded the most recent version of HiMDRenderer, I am happy to correct my own previous assertions that this is impossible. Yes, you can use HiMDRenderer to import the tracks directly from a source disc, including tracks that are not recorded on the unit but were downloaded using SS. And yes, they are copied digitally. My one remaining question [which I cannot verify without having another machine with SS installed on it at hand] is whether a disc created from another SS installation [and thereby having DRM info completely unrelated to the "decoding" machine] can be copied this way. If such is the case, then HiMDRenderer is now capable of fully circumventing HiMD's DRM directly from the discs themselves.

I'm assuming that your wife's CD player is an MP3-CD player, not merely CD audio. You can use HiMDRenderer to convert to MP3, FLAC, OGG, and WAV [other than OMA]. To convert OMA tracks, they must have valid rights info in your SS library.

It's more difficult to determine version info with SB than SS - SS lists complete info, whereas SB doesn't really list anything except the program version and OpenMG module version. Still, even though it was/is based on assumptions, I always thought that the following were shared between SS and SB: * OpenMG module [actually a separate entity] * CD-Reading and CDDB modules * atrac3/plus codecs * NetMD / HiMD access modules

Low Volta: I was always under the impression that SB used the same codecs as SS [part of why SS must be installed before SB can work]. The main differences at the moment, from what I see, are simply that the SB interface has no been updated to reflect the availability of 352kbps or the "quality" setting. I could be wrong, but it always seemed like a fair assumption to me. Incidentally, Chris G, as with Low Volta I usually use SB to copy my CDs. SS gets pulled out when I want to transfer MP3s asis, or upload tracks I've recorded myself. The only music I maintain [atrac/3/plus] copies of in my SS library are copies of compilations I've made; they remain properly gapless, and the only place I ever copy them to from this source [since I always keep lossless-packed disc images on DVD-ROM as well] is HiMD at any rate.

Heh. I'm really not on the ball these days, am I.

Would you like me to send you a file so we can find out for ourselves?

The root of this could also be a misbehaving system Mp3 codec, such as ffdshow [versions previous to mid-2004 are known to cause problems, later ones do not by my experience], or the audio codecs included with some DVD playing software [which claim to be for AC3 decoding but sometimes interefere with MP3 as well]. If you have any codec packs installed, I would suggest searching about them for known issues. Having multiple MP3 codecs installed is also known to cause issues under certain circumstances. For most people I would recommend sticking with the simplest standby codec, from FhG [the patent holders on MP3]. This is included with many games and other pieces of software that incorporate MP3 playback, and can be considered the lowest common denominator. I use the most recent version of ffdshow, which SS uses for transcoding and playback of MP3s, with no issues whatsoever [and it has never caused any issues with MP3 playback or transcoding in SS for me since I started using it in mid-2004, despite the claims by many that ffdshow is the #1 cause of such problems - they're simply and completely full of shit on the matter]. Please note that the "official" ffdshow site [on sourceforge] is unmaintained and only carries an ancient version that is one of the ones known to cause problems. Simply use Google to find a newer one [search for "ffdshow binary"] if this interests you, but keep in mind that ffdshow itself is NOT meant to be used by the average user who desires simple plug and play use; it's meant more for obsessive tweaker-geeks like myself who want control over everything. In summary, I would check your system to be sure that you don't have multiple MP3 codecs installed; that you don't have an old version of ffdshow installed [and if you're a non-technical user to not use ffdshow at all]; and to check for codec packs that may cause conflicts.

It's as reliable as the notebook computer you're using is. There are some very good quality portable audio interfaces [that support coax SP/DIF, optical, and analogue in and out] that are relatively inexpensive while being capable of decent 24-bit A/D conversion. Many of these lack microphone preamps, though, or lack the exact connections required [such as powered 3.5mm stereo connections for MD-compatibile mics, or XLR inputs for professional mics]. M-Audio among others makes portable audio interfaces that also include mic preamps, for connection via USB or firewire. Bizarrely, their product line features very inconsistent support for different connection types across their model line, their model with phantom-powered XLR inputs being limited to 16-bit audio, for instance, while one other supports 3.5mm powered mics and 24-bit ADC but not XLR, &c. If you have any serious interest in recording this way, do your research thoroughly to be sure that you actually get what meets your needs. The biggest hassle with notebook computer recording on location tends to be power. Large-capacity hard discs and built-in DVD/CD writers are advantageous, but running on battery power can mean being limited to recordings not much longer in duration than with HiMD equipment. This can of course be remedied as long as you can remain tethered to AC power.