dex Otaku

Yes. Until SS decides to trash some tracks on you, at least.

In the "transfer" window on the HiMD side, down at the bottom is a "Properties" button. Click that, it's in the dialogue that comes up.

The standard molded rubber/plastic mic clip used by Peavey [and sold with their stage mics] fits a MS907 snugly and has the standard thread size on it for mic stands. They can be bought separately for something like $5-10USD. Rubberised clips reduce handling noise somewhat. A hard plastic clip transmits such noise. This is important if [like I did] you are using the mic for capturing sound for foley purposes on a handheld boom. Peavey's rubberised clips are also somewhat more durable than most hard plastic ones, since they are basically unbreakable.

A Shure SM-57 [as with the 58, etc.] is a poor choice for multiple reasons. First and foremost, this is a dynamic stage microphone, meant for mic'ing vocals or instruments. It's only well-suited for close-mic'ing, and it has limited frequency response as well as a rather dramatic response curve that peaks nearest the vocal range. Second is that it uses a balanced connector and will require the use of an adapter just to plug in. This is a quibbling minus, but I'll point out that depending on where you get such adapters, they can cost from $20-50CAD [Canadian dollars, 1CAD ~= 0.8USD]. The MS907 is not a bad microphone but I would suggest looking atthe Sound Professionals "copy" of it first, as it apparently outperforms the Sony in every respect. A couple of mic builders/dealers to look at: http://www.reactive.com http://www.soundprofessionals.com Also look on sites like http://www.minidisc-canada.com and http://www.minidisco.com for an idea of what mics are commonly used with minidisc equipment. As far as overall versatility goes I would choose either a MS-Stereo mic [better for situations where you want some degree of noise rejection, btw] or a stereo pair of mini-condensors such as reactive and sound professionals sell. They are well-suited for multiple purposes.

For anyone who has been using a computer as a primary music player [my computer essentially -is- my stereo, television, VCR, DVD player, A/V editing station, etc.] since, say, 1997 or earlier, and manages a library of anywhere between 1,000-5,000 tracks on it, SS's interface is like a step back to the dark ages. DRM is mostly a concern for those of us who do recording and basically -need- access to our own recordings [to which -we- hold the copyright, not Sony]. Basically, my view is that there should be no restrictions on what I can do with my own recorded material. I should be able to jack in, dump the recording, and edit/burn it at my leisure, not go through a hundred steps keeping copies in multiple formats because the RIAA is afraid that I'll copy someone's CD - which if I wanted to, I'd do digitally in the clear with freely available, free software [that's better than SS any day] anyway, and certainly not use my HiMD for. Sure, SS is as good or as stable as say, MusicMatch and the like, most of which are also absolute crap.

It's real, yes. To my knowledge some of the VAIO notebooks had these as internal drives for a spell, too. AFAIK they are for MD-Data only, though.

If you're meaning making a copy of an MD you recorded, going from your deck to the HiMD, I'd say it -should- depend on what the SCMS flag on the original recording is. However - the rumour is that no digitally-made recordings will be convertible by Sony's WAV converter, regardless of their source or what the SCMS flag was on the original. I'm not sure that SS will even let you upload them, regardless of what the SCMS flags are. You will, however, be able to do realtime copies using Total Recorder. This is not an advantage in your case, though. It would be far simpler to get a digital i/o box for your computer and plug the deck straight into it, meaning only one pass is required in real time.

SHN, btw, is Shorten, another lossless format.

As someone who's been working periodically in various aspects of sound production and/or recording [non-professionally] for over ten years, I'd say that no, a half metre cable isn't going to make a big difference to a signal coming from equipment of unknown quality - probably turntables with ill-maintained styli plugged into preamps/integrated amps that have been left on for ten years or more, if your Uni is anything like those here [Canada]. Universities don't tend to have very well-maintained equipment everywhere you go. Some, yes. But most, especially in the library where equipment is frequently abused rather harshly by both faculty and students who have no clue how to use it, have techs [if they even have techs at all] who take one look at the stuff and shrug, deciding to do as little maintenance as possible considering the abuse dished out. Anyway. No, a half-metre cable won't make a big difference. I'd also note that you'd probably be better off getting a durably-made 1.5 - 2 metre cable [3.5mm to dual RCA is most likely what you'll need] just so you have something that's more versatile. And no, a 2 metre cable won't make a huge difference either. Just don't run your lines through nests of power cabling. Check the FAQ area [the subforum of this one] for info on transferring your tracks to a PC, too. If you're not going to be doing so, I'd suggest getting a 10-pack of blank standard MDs and using HiSP to dub the LPs. You'll be able to fit several albums on one HiMD-formatted MD.

The line in on all HiMD models is both an optical digital in and a standard 3.5mm stereo analogue in [same type as the plug on your earphones].

That option has always been turned off [by default] on mine.

As long as your OS supports USB mass-storage devices, yes, you can drag'n'drop transfer any file of any type to HiMD-formatted media, be they 1GB discs or traditional MDs. No. HiMD does not natively play any formats other than atrac3 and atrac3+, Sony's proprietary audio coding systems. You can take mp3s back and forth between computers, sure. But the units will not play them. SonicStage [sS, and its sidekick app, Simple Burner] is required for encoding / transcoding and transferring tracks to MD and HiMD media. SS is required for uploading analogue-recorded tracks from HiMD media to your computer. No other software currently works with HiMD, and no plans to include such functionality in any other software are currently known. Making an app that would be compatible with Sony's protocols and the atrac3/atrac3+ CODECs would require liscensing them. As stated in the HiMD FAQ: data transfer rate of MDs formatted to HiMD is 4.37Mbps; with 1GB HiMDs it is 9.83Mbps. Assuming these are peak values and apply only to reading the disc, the fastest the HiMD can move data from a disc is under the USB 1.1 peak rate of 12Mbps [source: usb.org]. Writeable MD and HiMD are also magneto-optical. MO media are not famous for their speed. Point being: the write speed is actually slow. For writing a few songs to a disc, it's fine. For writing data [outside of SonicStage] my tests [writing a single 950MB archive to HiMD for copying to another computer] have shown it to take in excess of 50 minutes to do so on average [with a system that is otherwise idle]. I do not recommend using HiMD as a mass-storage device for anything other than a few small documents. SonicStage it is. And -only- SonicStage. Unless you have newer Sony/Sonic Foundry software such as Sound Forge 7.0b, which at the very least will apparently write to netMDs, and will enable the user to encode atrac3/atrac3+ files. On my athlon XP 2500+ I can rip a full CD and encode it to atrac3+ 256kbps in under 4 minutes [average]. That seems reasonable to me. Whether you're encoding to mp3 or atrac3, you still have to wait. To my knowledge, the NH-1 requires the cradle. I would recommend the NH900 if anything, because it also supports using ordinary AA dry cells. The NH-1 and NH900 use unconventional batteries. See here: http://www.minidisc.org/himd_table.html The NH900 also supports AAs. The 600-800s all use AAs exclusively. I consider the unconventional batteries to be a huge minus, personally. I have yet to make any MD or HiMD player I've ever used skip. I'll note that the newer units themselves are made more of plastic than anything else. Mind you, I have dropped my NH700 [all plastic] from maybe 1m high a few times now and it still works as it should. Encoding/transcoding takes time, yes. But then, unless you're dealing exclusively with a collection of ripped-off, I mean downloaded mp3s, ripping your own CDs takes time whether you're using iTunes or SonicStage to do so. Cheers, D

OGG seems an obvious choice. FLAC seems another. Both of these, if I'm not mistaken, fit your criteria or at least have a command-line encoder that making calls to isn't that difficult a thing to do [i.e. FLAC]. See http://flac.sourceforge.net/ I would also suggest the option of combined mono [as previously requested by someone else] output [i.e. 50%L + 50%R], as well as mono from L only and mono from R only, the DSP for which is, as you already stated, pretty simple.

What's interesting about this is that that is an exact description of the SS upload bug that trashes tracks.

I love the Hallowe'en theme.. Great job.. And in case I miss it at the end of the month, merry Samhain [to those of you in the northern hemisphere - merry Beltaine to those in the southern!]

You can't use Windows Update with XP Home without it being validated, AFAIK. That doesn't mean you can't dl just the hotfix, though.

Not a problem. Jadeclaw suggested the temp folder/file possibility; I can't verify it as I know that my own system doesn't fill up its temp folder as some do. I can verify from experience that SS trashes the occasional track regardless of the fact that I have between 6-15X more than the amount of free space required to both temporarily store and copy tracks from HiMD->hard disc with SS, though. That doesn't eliminate the possibility, of course. It just means that it's not the issue in my case. I also do a lot of audio processing, but the partition all my recordings get stored on has between 10-30GB free at any given time, which would suggest that free space on the destination partition is also not my issue. My biggest suspicion is that it's something to do with how SS handles USB communications or serial tasks - the times it's dumped tracks on me were when I selected a large number to transfer in one go. I now select 4 at a time.

How is anyone supposed to support my credibility? I'm willing to bet that no one lives within 1,000km of me, for one thing. Did you want evidence or something?

I disagree, unless you still happen to have a 10GB hard disc in your computer. I have done this up to 6+ hours by leaving it unattended overnight. Yes, it required splitting the >2GB file later and opening the segments as raw if I needed to use them [i didn't] but the backup is still possible and not really that big a deal. [As a note: WAV file sizes are generally limited to 2048MB - a limitation imposed by many if not most programs that use WAV files, as part of the file format, not hard disc format.] Most of my recordings are about 2-3 hours in length, and I -always- back them up first. Perhaps I have the luxury of lots of space dedicated just for A/V editing, though.

I haven't tried this as I have always recorded from the mic in with my NH700 and never tried this with the older units I used. My guess is that you'll get the auto trackmarks but it will likely still place markers where the levels go sufficiently low for longer than 2 seconds. I might be wrong though.

If you turn manual record levels on, AGC is turned off. It's one or the other. That's pretty much how I'd do it, though I'm not familiar with your mic and the acoustics of where you're recording and how they balance the PA. I usually record clean [no filtering] and do EQ afterwards; I'm from the old-school way of thought when it comes to EQ: passive EQ is OK, active EQ [increasing levels in a band] is not. [comes from using analogue equipment; subtracting is okay, adding isn't because it adds noise]

This is an excellent point, and one that I seem t always forget in my advice. Every Sony I've used defaulted to low sensitivity, though. Which what you generally want. Good show.

I have had tracks lost that were very small, very large, etc. in HiSP and PCM. Basically, the tracks that have gotten trashed have happened completely at random, with no specific regard to length, format, etc. It appears to be completely a matter of chance, if you ask me. I have transferred entire 950MB tracks [a nearly full disc] without any problems, so I really don't think it's the size issue. Unless - unless it is to do with the temp folder. My temp folder is on a separate partition of 6GB just for temp. It's not likely to get filled.

Or for that matter, a way to bypass making .oma's altogether, as well as the upload counter.

This is so .. inobvious .. that it should almost be made a stickie.