dex Otaku

What you're doing, SlowMo, is basically the same thing described above. It's just slightly more work with Sound Forge [since it doesn't allow manipulation of multiple files on a single timeline].

Peak read speeds are roughly twice what peak write speeds are. It is definitely enough for 1.4Mbps writing, but the difference between it writing PCM as audio and it writing as a mass storage device is that the audio way buffers things a ways before writing; mass-storage mode I would doubt could sustain 1.4Mbps write speeds; if the disk were even remotely fragmented, or had to seek for any reason, you would likely get dropouts due to buffer overflows. That's theory, mind you. The only way to find out is to try it.

I doubt that HiMD would actually be able to keep up to continuous recording in mass-storage mode. It would be nice to be proved wrong though. I wonder what the audio specs are like for it.

The point isn't tot market against the iPod. It's to market the product on its own strengths - which would well-serve a rather sizeable market of audio amateurs and professionals who do their work exclusively on Macs. In the multimedia world, my current observations based on people I know and work/play with, about 50-65% of the audio people run Macs exclusively. That's a pretty sizeable market to ignore, considering it's exactly who they should be aiming their products at.

We need someone who's more of an expert at analogue circuits than I am.

With the remote recording, the mics were not in my ears, rather they were set on a soft surface with the elements facing up. With the AC power recording, I was holding them up in my hand, and one was likely facing away from me. Um - because I can't? I don't have permission to do so. Or so I thought.

I guess that makes neither Sony nor Apple very professional, then?

If you need an external hdd that has to be powered by USB, you'll probably have to get a notebook drive. To the best of my knowledge, full-sized hdds pretty much always need >500mA to run; I've actually yet to see an external firewire or USB drive that doesn't need its own power supply.

Be aware that all consumer CD players should respect the rules of SCMS. Most newer CDs that are copy-protected apparently do not respect SCMS at all, and do not allow even one generation of copy to be made from them. DVD players are another story. Whether they'll respect SCMS even with unprotected CDs is iffy; whether they'll respect SCMS with DVDs of any kind is usually a simple "no," though some that will transcode non-PCM audio to PCM for digital output will allow 1st-gen copies. The only way to find out is to try it.

One of the possible reasons Sony don't make remotes with recording functions... see here: http://forums.minidisc.org/index.php?showtopic=13335

Just a little demo. The purpose here is to show what can happeen when recording with either a remote plugged in or when using the AC adapter. Recording conditions: * RH10 HiMD recorder in HiSP mode, AGC on * SP-TFB-2 microphones and Sony ECM-MS907 mic * RM-MC35ELK one-line LCD remote for two [remote and mic cables run in opposite directions, cables not crossed] * AC wall-wart used for two [JP model "universal" adapter] * some editing done to clip my silly speaking, but no processing was used Conditions of downloading these files: * Don't play from my server. Download once, then listen. * Be patient. Upstream bandwidth is limited. The files: [lame --alt-preset standard mp3s] RH10 with SP-TFB-2 mics and RM-MC35ELK remote RH10 with MS907 mic and RM-MC35ELK remote RH10 with SP-TFB-2 mics and AC adapter plugged in RH10 with MS907 mic and AC adapter plugged in And yes, that's my voice.

Incidentally, PUMA was in part developed to make utilities like Total Recorder impossible to implement in the future.

More importantly, many of those who only drop by fora occasionally don't realise the amount of work the mods and admins put in. The mods and admins don't keep lists of current or old topics. When someone asks a question that's already been answered, the relevant threads to refer the users to are not at their immediate disposal. Like anyone else, including the new users, they have to go searching for the thread. As rude as it may seem to some, it often comes down to whose time gets spent looking for the requested [and pre-existing] information. This is probably the #1 reason why the "please use the search function" response gets used as often as it does. It's also why the most important threads get stickied or moved/copied to the FAQ/Howto subfora that already exist. While yes, there are a number of relevant topics that resurface regularly and aren't stickied, the other half of the above equation is the fact that to collect all that info into links, someone has to do the work. The staff here aren't full-time, paid employees of a company. They're volunteers [even taking into consideration some of the honoraria given to staff in return for work they've done above and beyond the everyday call of volunteers] who put the time in here for many reasons, including love of the format and love of their craft, along with the desire to share information with other users. I have been a part of a few fora, bulliten boards, and newsgroups over the years, and I know personally how much time can be spent on just keeping things running. I also know from experience that the staff and "frequent flyers" here are honestly the easiest to get along with of any forum I have ever taken part in. As for myself - I may have a bit of a reputation as cantankerous and short-tempered, but please don't let that reflect on the staff here. We each have our own opinions and personalities.

Sounds like a [benign] bug in the buffering used by g-shock protection, to me.

I have already seen problems with WinXP and certain displays with games that force directx to check for secured display devices.. forcing users who own LCD panels with DVI interfaces that lack the security feature to use analogue RGB because the displays simply go black when you attempt to play the games [MS games, incidentally]. I fully expect to see this built in to Vista, basically rendering many HDTV and LCD displays completely useless when using the DVI interface. It's pretty sad, really.

Windows -> intel OS X would be more like Windows -> linux. The biggest issues that I see are caused by the various programming APIs out there; the ones that are shared amongst all three of the above are pretty much anaethema to anyone who wants to make software that is to stay 100% proprietary. It's certainly not that it can't be done; it's more that it's not an attractive option for companies who actually want to force total lock-in on their customers - companies like Sony.

This is a valid and serious point. One possible argument against .. The vast majority of users are completely ignorant as to what an OS does. Most people buy a computer, not an operating system. The OS is simply something that's there when they buy it, and even if they're previous computers users, the only things they'll really notice are the changes that have occurred since the last version they used that mean they have to relearn all kinds of things they don't and likely never will understand. I've been a technician and consultant since I was in high school, and I'd have to say that the vast majority of the clients I've worked with couldn't have cared less about whether their computer ran DOS or Windows of any version. All they cared about was that they could do their word-processing, their home accounting, or check their email. This is a large part of how MS manages to penetrate the market so far with such vastly inferior "products" as Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player, &c. People don't care about the internals; they just want the thing to work - and usually to be cheap as well. MS want to sell lots of copies of Vista, but the truth is that the majority of their average-consumer customers simply don't care about it, or XP, or 2000, or linux, or OS X, or NextStep, or ... you get the idea. They just want something that works [which, it could be argued, Windows in its many versions has not]. The real testing point comes about when the customers are faced with issues like those presented by SonicStage - suddenly they can't do what they've always been doing, nothing works the way they expect, and they have limitations placed on them at every turn. Not only this, but they appear to have no choice whatsoever in the matter; they are victims of lock-in from the get-go, and don't even realise it until it's long since too late. My hope is that Vista includes DRM, and that ordinary customers all around the world will suddenly realise what a piece of unremitting crap they've been sold without having any real [perceived] choice in the matter. I don't honestly expect average users to suddenly migrate to linux or something, but I sincerely hope that vast numbers of people will raise unholy hell with the corporations that are making decisions for us as consumers, without ever consulting us on the matter. As for myself, I can't see myself upgrading until hardware driver unavailability forces me to. I fully expect Vista to be festooned with all kinds of limitations that will crimp my normal workflow with digital media to such a degree as to make it next to useless. I'd rather stick with the evil I'm familiar with, when it comes down to it. Maybe a couple of years after Vista's introduction, after some of the tools have been developed to unbreak the myriad problems it creates in an effort to impose BS rules on consumers, I'll consider switching. My real hope is that by then, the production tools for linux will have evolved enough to permit actual work to be done when using it as an OS. At the moment, the tools I use have me suffering lock-in to Windows, which honestly peeves me, but then - I'm not a software developer, so I can't exactly make something as complicated as Photoshop myself [and yes, I've been using the Gimp since about 1997, but it's simply not as good or as usable as Photoshop; kind of like how Audacity doesn't do half of what I'd need it to]. Either that, or that Apple manages to wake up and lower the price of Macs by at least another 20%.

Apple's switching processors does not imply the easier porting of software; the OS and its underlying philosophy is still entirely different [from the Windows world], as are the majority of development tools outside of the open-source way of doing things. I seriously doubt that Apple moving to Intel processors will have any effect on Sony's [non-] Apple support. That said, it's probable that Windows "emulation" layers or already-existing software that runs Windows from OSX will see greatly-enhanced performance from not having to translate for differing processors.

Note that despite all my warnings [in the gapless howto] about brief repeated bits in auto-trackmarked recordings, I've only ever experienced such with recordings made with LINE-IN. Microphone recordings should still be fine to combine, even if you use AUTO TIME MARK. It's the level-based auto marking used with line-in that causes the repeated sections. I stopped using SS's combine function after having to deal with 30+ hours of line-in sourced recordings, so I can't speak as to whether SS 3.3 has problems with that function, but I'd been using it since v2.2 or so without any problems with mic recordings.

Might I point out that unless the band and their publisher advertise a gig as taper-friendly, you're violating copyright/intellectual property laws by recording their shows. It may be disappointing not to be able to take your gear in and stealth-record a show, but it's technically not legal for you to do it most of the time anyway. The publishers, not the bands, basically make this decision. Independants and bands who have stipulated in their contracts that they be taper-friendly aren't a problem, but the vast majority of major-label acts are decidedly taper-UNfriendly by the simple fact that their publishers control the rights to their IP, not them. Under current law in most countries, it is not a spectator's right to record a show. Lots of people do it anyway, and unless they distribute the recording no one is the wiser, but technically they are breaking the law the vast majority of the time.

If I had a device with SP/DIF optical out, I could make a fair comparison. As I don't, all I would be comparing is the input preamps of the two units.

I have done some tests comparing the RH10 to the NH700 - however, the RH10 has a digital amp, the NH700 is standard analogue, so the comparison can not be as direct as would be required to actually test the codecs.

Ah .. hmm. I guess what confused me was the line "I was using WiMP to upload" .. because my brain is stuck in Hi-MD mode [good god, I'd better not do any editing..] and Hi-MD can neither be transferred to or from using anything but SS and Simple Burner. As for the semantic issue, in what I would call "classical terms", uploading and downloading in computer terms .. uploading is when you put a file somewhere, and downloading when you receive a file from somewhere. Most portable storage devices I tend to think in terms of something I would upload to [put things on], and download from [take things from], since the device is the "other end" and my computer is "here". Sony's terminology reverses the roles of that context - the computer is "there" and the device is 'here" .. which isn't actually nonsensical, especially if you think in terms of the computer being the "client" end [running Sony's client software for your device], but for my old-school thinking it still seems backwards.

This is just a niggling point, but it is confusing for everyone at the best of times: In terms of HiMD: * UPloading is transferring tracks FROM the unit TO your computer * DOWNloading is transferring tracks TO your unit FROM your computer Why Sony chose to make this terminology the reverse of what virtually anyone with any tech savvy would call it is beyond me, but these are the terms as used by Sony, Sony's software, our manuals, &c. Sorry greenshank, not meaning to pick on you - just wanting to note that this makes all our language accidentally unclear attimes.

Thanks, richyhu.