dex Otaku

Ah. A little misunderstanding there - when I say I name the tracks on my HiMD, what I mean is that I use SonicStage to title tracks on the HiMD -before- transferring them. Among other things, this makes it so that the files created by SS are already named intelligibly, making them easier to find with, say, HiMDRenderer. Like I said, I've titled tracks on my HiMDs using SonicStage many times, and never seen it produce a duplicate. Incidentally, right-clicking doesn't bring up a box to edit the title. Left-clicking can. Um. Maybe you abbreviated there. Could you try saying it again in "longhand"? Because this really doesn't make even a little bit of sense to me (again, mainly because I've renamed such a large number of tracks with SS but never had this same result).

That's an optical cable - which, at one end, has a standard TOSLINK connector and at the other has one made to fit the 3.5mm line-in (opt) jack on your HiMD. If you have any digital audio equipment with optical digital outputs on them, you can use this to record directly to your HiMD.

There is no equivalent to TOC cloning with HiMD since it does not use the same disc format. The only advice I can give is to back up your recordings using the realtime transfer method described here before uploading them with SonicStage. You can make analogue backups if you prefer, but Total Recorder is only $11.95USD and is worth paying for. C'est dommage that you lost so many tracks. I haven't had this happen [yet] myself, and I haven't heard of it happening to anyone else. Jadeclaw had some advice a while back about keeping cabling clear and making sure that the ferrite chokes were securely in place, especially on the USB cable. To my knowledge there is currently no known method of recovering these tracks. Perhaps if you called Sony and persistently complained, they might be able to point you in the right direction - chances are you'd end up sending your disc to the one person at Sony in Japan who knows enough to get the data off, though.

This is too vague for me to give any advice on. If you can get specific info on what the error is, exactly when it occurs, what format and type of disc is being used, what mode the unit is in, &c... these would be helpful.

The elucidate on marcnet's reply: You can only convert a track using HiMDRenderer on the machine that the track was uploaded to (from HiMD) using SonicStage. This is the nature of DRM.

All you have to do is pay them the liscensing fees, and you'll have what you want.

(This is related to the thread about the MD deck with 20-bit playback.) Why do some MDs claim 20+bit recording and playback? Lossy formats such as mp3, atrac, &c. use various transform methods to convert data from linear PCM [time-domain] to the frequency-domain. Fourier transforms, discrete cosine and modified cosine transforms, &c. tend to be the most common wasy of doing this. What this means, in English, is that once the original PCM data is compressed, it doesn't even have a bit-resolution per se - at least, not in the conventional PCM sense. While the sampling rate has to be locked [or resampling done] between all stages of encoding/decoding, the bit depth is actually kind of irrelevant. As long as the codec knows how to handle more bits, what you'll end up with is a slightly more accurate encoding. And when I say slightly, I'd opine that it's so slight as to be marginal, but still maybe measurable. Likewise, when decoding you can do so to any bit depth, with higher bit depths getting marginally better accuracy [as long as they're properly dithered adn noise-shaped] from the decoder. This does not mean that you can decode something at a higher resolution and get better results than what originally went into the encoder, however. GIGO - Garbage In, Garbage Out; if you rip a CD [16 bit audio] and then decode it as 20-bit, all you're doing is getting a more accurate decoding of the compressed format it's in. You can NOT get something better than the original. It's LOSSY, remember? In the end, I personally consider this a huge non-issue; since 95% of source material out there now is quantised to 16-bits, the differences that higher-resolution playback equipment can make are negligible at best. It would be better to concern ourselves with proper dither &c.

It will probably work in the sense of functioning properly, but not in the sense of functioning well. I'd expect that it would just be unbearably slow.

I don't have the energy to go through all the questions here. So please, if you have 5 minutes extra, go through some old threads and post a reply on here with pertinent questions that have been asked and a link to the post they're from. Maybe if we build an index, this job can get done easier and we'll have fewer people asking the same questions over and over again. People are more inclined to look for answers if things are centralised. If some of this gets assembled I'm willingto start building an FAQ from them.

I bought my 700 from them [pre-ordered it before it was released actually] and their service was excellent. They're good people to deal with, and I haven't been able to find better prices anywhere in Canada than they have.

This is probably because they'd rather avoid the endless hassles caused by the fact that warranties generally do not transfer country to country. For instance: most computer manufacturers in North America sell the same models in both Canada and the US. Their warranties don't go where the computer goes, however; meaning that if you take your notebook from Canada into the US, and suddenly need service [even if it was clearly a defect issue covered by warranty] the only way to have it done is to ship the unit back to Canada. Most customers, even if they have this explained to them [read: even if they are smashed over the head with it repeatedly] cannot grasp this concept and get very angry with the place that sold them the equipment [and the people who work there]. Sony also have fantastic rules such as - if you buy your equipment from a non-Sony-accredited dealer, it has no warranty at all. None. Zip. Zilch. Zeeeero.

I don't understand. I always name the tracks on my HiMD before transferring them - how are you getting duplicates of them on the disc by using rename? Something tells me you're mistaken. [Probably the fact that I have named upwards of 150 tracks on HiMD formatted discs in the transfer window and never seen SS create a duplicate.]

SS damaging tracks has absolutely nothing to do with the deletion option. If the delete option is turned off, and something ges trashed, you can't recover it by the Total Recorder method. [Note that one user reported a trashed track that still played after not being uploaded, but this appears to be the exception rather than the rule]. I run the realtime method as a backup, then upload with SonicStage after. This way tracks can be combined in SS if I wish, and there are no gaps to have to clean up later. If SS trashes a track, all I have to do is open my backup and take the section I need.

There is no conversion from PCM to ATRAC. And my experience with transferring PCM is that is runs between 2.5-3X realtime, so a 60 minute track should only take 20-25 minutes. Mind you, that's depending on your computer, what else you have running, &c. - so mileage may vary. Where did you get this idea? If you record in PCM, it gets transferred to SonicStage as PCM. There is no loss and no conversion [though there is some debate now as to whether Sony's WAV converter is watermarking its output]. If what you're referring to is SS's converting your PCM recording to atrac3/plus in order to write to an atrac3/plus CD - that's another matter entirely.

That really sucks. Your chances of getting your money back might be better than you think, though. Look through eBay's FAQ, for one thing. For another, if you're both in the UK you could always consider threatening the seller with small claims court.

ebay. ebay ebay ebay.

I basically can't. It's how my attention span works; same thing with TV [which is why I don't have a TV, antenna, or cable]. If there's music playing, I tend to get sucked into it to the exclusion of everything else. Then again, it has been proposed to me that I am at the extremely-high-functioning end of the autism spectrum.

It's funny because of the next sentence, which pointed out that the principles by which lossy compression work are better-suited, if not actually purposefully made, for working over speakers rather than headphones. It wasn't anything against your hi-fi. A properly-made cassette recording of an LP will have higher dynamic range, better channel separation, better frequency response, &c. compared to a CD ripped directly to 64 or 48kbps atrac3+. I would rather listen to the cassette dub of the LP, myself. I can't not let it annoy me. Certain kinds of artifacting are very literally like nails on a blackboard for me. Given sufficient exposure, it will actually start to cause me physical pain to listen to music at low bitrates. [note that I also experience physical pain from things like harmonic dissonance - out of tune instruments playing together, and off-key vocals.] I will specify though: I very rarely listen to music as something in the background. I almost -always- listen with either headphones or over my mini system [hooked up to the computer] from an ideal position for the spaker placement I have. Which means that while I am not constantly analysing what I'm hearing, I am listening in a way that most people simply do not - I listen closely. I know of very few people who -ever- actually listen this way, including professional musicians, sound engineers, and people with 5,000-album CD collections whom you would think of as probably having a critical ear. But they don't. They enjoy their music in a completely different way than I do. They never notice the subtleties, or have the edits jump out at them. It's not that I work at hearing the artifacts. It's that they're there, and they annoy me. Period. I can not shut that off. Or at least, I can't shut it off without heavy recreational drug use. Of course, there is a threshold bitrate for every codec above which the artifacts no longer bother me. Which is why I wish that HiMD / atrac3+ had, say, a 192kbps or even 160kbps mode. For portable use, 256kbps still seems like overkill to me - but the next jump down in quality [LP2] just doesn't cut it for sonically dense/complex material. I think Sony really missed the boat on that one. Mind you.. Here might be part of their logic as to the bitrates: With MDLP, you can get 80mins@SP, 160mins@LP2, and 320mins@LP4 .. with HiMD - on a HiMD-formatted standard MD [80min] HiSP gives you 140mins [and 64kbps HiLP gives you 610mins]. So basically - it's like having SP quality with almost-LP2 recording time. Users who are accustomed to LP2 can now have higher-quality audio, just slightly less of it. Also: given that 1GB discs are supposed to be the chosen media [ha. Hah! HAH! Hahahahahahaha.. yeah.. they'll be commonly available... eventually..], HiSP gives 7:55 recording time, which is a fair amount for one 64mm disc. In any case - there are those of us who are willing to sacrifice a -little- quality [*not* half the bitrate] in order to get, say, 20% more music on one disc. Wow. I'm rambling again.

I haven't had this happen myself yet, but I have heard of others who experienced things like this when their HiMD was connected to their PC via USB and the PC crashed. Basically it's a firmware crash. Removing the battery [doing a full power cycle] essentially reboots the unit.

High sensitivity mode would have the mic preamp in solid clipping in a loud concert situation. All you are likely to record [even with the AGC] is distortion. If the AGC has enough range to compensate, you'll likely end up with an extremely loud, noisy recording. Low sens, manual levels is what I recommend. The AGC circuit in HiMDs appears to be significantly different [and a lot better] than on the previous-generation MDs. I frequently skip using manual levels now if I'm in a situation where the sound isn't any louder than a certain level. I avoid using it for music, though.

You're welcome. I'm glad I found this place and you people - it directly affected my purchasing a HiMD, for one thing. RE: T-Board, I go by there every now and then, it really appears that it's flooded with a constant barrage of newbies who make one post and never return. The few repeat-posters I have noted are also on this board. I keep thinking of collecting all the simple but -distinct- questions people have been asking re HiMD / SonicStage and assembling them into something. But then.. I'm lazy and I procrastinate.

I have never experienced any dropouts, skips, lost sections, &c. when using any MD/HiMD equipment. Excluding times when I let the battery die, at least. Recording is quite robust. As with stevetoney, I avoid suecting the unit to jostling or vibration while recording, though.

MD equipment records in ATRAC, the version depending on how recent the recorder is. HiMD records in both MD modes [with standard MD formatted discs, and when told to] and HiMD modes, aka atrac3plus in addition to PCM [exactly the same format as audio CDs use]. No MD or HiMD recorders either play or record mp3s [directly]. Also, compared to the availabe atrac modes with an MDLP recorder, mp3 has no advantage in quality vs. size.

If you uploaded them with SonicStage pre v2.2 [i believe] you can convert the files from .OMG to .OMA with a conversion util that comes with SS. They should then show up in the WAV converter. I hope.

Indeed. I would actually use a CD/HiMD for making compilation discs and such. That way there'd be no SonicStage, and *hardware encoding* for atrac3plus modes. Of course, they'd also have to make it possible to use any of the atrac3 and atrac3plus bitrates, including original SP. Oh, and an ethernet port and bluetooth to get cddb access. Yeah, I know... Dream on. edit: Strange how I see something else emerge when I reread what I've written. In the context of an appliance like I've described here.. where only the Hi/MD side is a writer.. the DRM system makes sense and would work really well.