dex Otaku

Sounds a bit like something is changing the levels while you're recording with Wave Studio. Those solid blocks would likely be clipping distortion from the input being overloaded. As to Audacity, are the settings valid for your Audigy? I mean bit depth [16 / 24 bit] and sampling rate [44,100 / 48,000, etc.]. Maybe Audiacity is having to resample everything because a setting is werd somehow. I can't recall what it defaults to, but this sounds at least plausible; quantising distortion can sound like static at times. There's also the possibility that it's set to use an overactive drive on your computer for its temporary files, and is experiencing just -slight- gapping as a result. I'm grasping at straws though. Perhaps you could email me a clip of one of your recordings? Even 10 seconds would do. I might be able to tell what the problem is just by listening. Oh.. and this should really be moved to the tech support area.

I don't exactly understand your question. When you play from the Hi-MD using SonicStage, it routes the audio [digitally] to your sound card. The USB port doesn't show up anywhere as an audio device [because it isn't one]. Total Recorder captures the stream put out of whatever you're playing from. Perhaps there's a setting in there that isn't correct. If you want to PM me with your settings I'll look at mine and let you know if there's a difference.

Why did they bother even including the option of supposed SP recording, then? Sheesh. So much for backward-compatibility.

Funny. I have the NH700, with the black remote with no display at all, and I don't normally look at the display on the unit either. The only thing I ever use it for is setting record levels and watching to be sure the TOC is done writing after recording. Oh, and using the menus to turn on manual rec levels. I never use it during playback.

Correction: if you're talking about an actual MD, not a Hi-MD or Hi-MD formatted MD, then no, there'sno uploading from those.

Go back to the index and read "Suggested method for uploading recordings from Hi-MD".

You're correct, but if your computer happens to BSOD and reboot in the middle of the Hi-MD being used, it loses power momentarily. It's just a safety measure.

Hmm. What -do- I do? Let's see. I'm a writer of sorts. Bad poetry is pretty much all I show to the general public. I'm a still photographer who still prefers film. My favourite subject is night photography, though I have done a lot of spontaneous portraiture over the years, as well as landscape photography. I shot a wedding for friends once, and plan never to do that again. I'm a sound engineer. While I openly admit that I've never done this professionally, I have run the PA for enough small shows over the past 12 years to have a good handle on what I'm doing, be well-respected for it, and be able to run a small show all by myself without any difficulty. I've been complemented on my ability to run a front of house board with the mains sitting at -10dBVU with the sound clear and more than loud enough to please the crowd. I'm also a recording engineer. I have recorded and mastered a small number of demo albums for local groups since 1996. Most recently I was engineer for an art gallery installation that featured a 5.1-surround "radio drama" which I engineered, mastered, and burned to DVD as AC3 right here in my living room. I'm a sound recordist. I have done numerous small jobs that could be considered foley, field recording, location recording, or whatever you want to call it. I'm a videographer. This is definitely in an amateur capacity, though I am fairly well-versed in the workings of professional equipment. For the most part I shoot shorts of family and community events, bring it home, edit it, and burn it to SVCD or DVD for friends and family members. I'm a divorced father of one son. I'm a computer [PC] technician with 13 years experience which followed several years of programming that started when I was about 11. I'm a relative internet-fogey, having been on the net in one capacity or another since 1987 or 88. I do desktop publishing/layout, though I do not consider myself a layout artist. ..And I am a cunning linguist. I know I missed a bunch of things I do, but hey, that's enough for now. :wink:

This has come up several times already, and I've already posted it in another thread, but I'm doing it again under its own thread so it's easy to find. Perhaps this should be stickied? After discussion with Jadeclaw and enough personal experience with my NH700 and SonicStage, this is the method I have settled on for transferring recordings from my Hi-MD to my computer.. First and foremost, it requires that you be using Total Recorder. It is available from High Criteria at a rather nominal cost of $11.95USD, which is well worth paying considering what it does. The following assumes that you already have Total Recorder installed. * Open both SonicStage [sS] and Total Recorder [TR] * Plug in your Hi-MD via USB and insert the disc to copy tracks from. I'd suggest plugging it in to its AC adapter as well, if it's a model without a dock. * Press record in TR * In SS, play the track you wish to record from the Hi-MD itself. DO NOT TRANSFER THE RECORDINGS TO YOUR COMPUTER FIRST. * Repeat as necessary to capture all your tracks in WAV format, making sure to save each track in TR and start a new one before continuing on with the next track in SS. * If you are really paranoid, now would be the time to clean up the recorded tracks [removing glitches from beginning and end] and write them to CD-R as a backup. [Note: writing them to audio CD is far less reliable a backup method than as WAVs to CD-R, simply because of the nature of CD audio.] * When you're done recording your tracks to WAV, THEN transfer the tracks using SS. I also go so far as to rename tracks on the Hi-MD before uploading, and matching the names on disc/in SS to the ones I save from TR. Please note as well that this isn't the -correct- way to do things. It's just the way I've figured is the safest at this point, since it's obvious that SS 2.1 has some rather nasty bugs that occasionally eat irreplacable tracks when you're trying to upload. Edit: An alternate method, the one I actually use since I am long since accustomed to editing huge files, is to dump the whole disc in one go and then split the resulting single WAV file into tracks afterwards. Edit: There's another alternative method - if your sound card driver includes a 'wave' option in the windows recording mixer, you can select that as your source and record in any application of your choosing - audacity, sound forge, cool edit, whatever - same as you would recording from an analogue source. You have to make sure that volume controls are all maxed [no attenuation, i.e. no DSP occurring] and that the record level control is at unity [no gain, no attenuation]. Recording in this case is still done all-digitally, and does not require having or using TR at all, though the chances of not getting a bit-for-bit copy are fairly high.

Hmm. Interesting about the VAIO. It's quite possible that my understanding about it is wrong. As I understood it, SonicStage as it came with the VAIOs was branded in some way - slightly different from the public release, and only for the VAIO computers. Or maybe I'm out to lunch on that.

Yes, that's exactly what most people are expecting. For several reasons: * What I record from an analogue source is -mine-, first and foremost. Not Sony's. If I want to edit and distribute it, that's my perogative. Sony have essentially taken "fair use" rights and thrown them out the window. * What are the chances that people are going to go around with their Hi-MD recorders and dub copyrighted material, like CDs, with them? Pretty low, I'd say - there's an optical in there, for one thing. There's also that nice USB cable that lets you rip straight from your computer to Hi-MD. I would assert that the majority of analogue-source recordings are not going to be copyrighted materials, or are going to be for personal use only. Sony's take on DRM has basically run with the assumption that every user in existence is a criminal who wants to mass-distribute copyrighted recordings, which is a steaming crock of caa-caa. * Sony's advertising for Hi-MD has suggested this capability from the beginning, not the closed-chain version that exists now and is so limiting as to make your personal recordings next to useless. The wave format has had common extensions that allow pretty much any tag information to be added to it for years. The only reason to use .omg is for the encryption and DRM info it carries. Total Recorder acts as a proxy to your sound card's driver, meaning that whatever bitstream leaves the program you're playing from gets captured exactly as it left that program. As long as there is no DSP of any kind being done by the program used for playback [enhancement, EQ, and even volume control count as DSP] what you get from TR should be a bit-for-bit copy of the source. As you've already digressed on, this doesn't work. It is important to note, however, that if [and only if] you're using a Sony VAIO computer, burning to CDs is permitted. I would say that is highly unlikely to happen. Whatever application the plugin would be written for would also have to be able to access SonicStage's database. Perhaps a future version of Sound Forge [since Sonic Foundry was purchased by Sony] could include this, but I doubt anyone else would be willing to pay the liscensing fees to Sony just so people can edit tracks from what is officially a consumer device, not a professional one. Indeed. I knew about this before I got my NH700 but it didn't mean much to me, as my practise has always been to dump footage/tracks as soon as I get home, duplicate them for backup, and erase the original media to be reused. I'd say you're right. There are problems with that. Among other things, Sony's DRM software and methods are most certainly NOT open source or public domain. This means that whoever makes such a utility would be legally obligated to pay liscensing fees for the software or methods required to interface with Hi-MD units. Which means charging a lot more for their software. One should also note that Sony have stated they will be releasing a wave convertor utility to go with SonicStage that will enable exporting of analogue-source tracks in an open WAV format for editing. It has been promised to be released "this fall." Cheers.

Linda: do you have anything else you can plug in to your sound card to check if it's the card or your MD causing the static? And do you have anything you can plug the MD into [computer speakers would work well] that you could use to check its output? I'm not familiar with wave studio, but does it give you realtime record level meters when you're recording? Just to be sure that you're not overloading the input of your audigy. Cheers.

Can anyone confirm whether SP mode on Hi-MD recorders being used in NetMD mode - recording from an analogue source, I mean - is really SP mode, or is it upsampled LP2?

I'd recommend a Hi-MD if only for these reasons: * Longer record length per disc, regardless of whether you're using standard MD or Hi-MD media * Backward-compatibility with standard MD media [you can record in standard MD mode if you wish] * Linear PCM recording option * Full-digital transfers via USB with your PC [not Mac though] - there are caveats with this, but if you're looking for the best transfer possible [i.e. lossless] it's either Hi-MD or buying a home MD deck to do transfers [both are realtime] I, personally, like having the options of ..7 hours 55 minutes recording with 256kbps atrac3plus on Hi-MD discs, or 2 hours 20 minutes on MDs [formatted in Hi-MD mode].. ..and 94 minutes of straight PCM recording on Hi-MD media, 28 minutes on MDs. The "lowest" model available in the Hi-MD line with mic and line inputs [what I bought due to budget constraints] is the MZ-NH700 - see here. I also did a review of it which you can find on this board here. I have tested the NH700 and it has thus far exceeded my expectations in every way. If your budget isn't as restricted as mine was, I'd suggest the NH900 as it uses both a NiMH battery and includes a AA adapter as well, and has an aluminum and plastic case compared to the NH700 / NHF800's all-plastic case. The biggest caveat to the Hi-MD line is that SonicStage is rather buggy software and requires a certain vigilance in its use [for uploading recordings you've made on the recorder] lest corruption of your tracks occur - caused specifically by bugs in SS, not a problem with the recorders themselves, from what we can tell. See Jadeclaw's thread here. If you're wary of Hi-MD I'd suggest looking at Sharp's MD recorders, many of which have slightly better features for location recording than Sony's offerings. Unfortunately, I'm not a reference on the Sharp line, but I imagine that Kurisu could give some advice on them if that is what you wish to look at. What is your budget? Feel free to ask more questions, of course. Cheers.

What the heck does pwns mean? Please: teach the net-fogey.

I don't mind the look of my NH700, but then, I've been known to have strange taste in equipment. And .. button thingy? You mean the shuttle wheel? God, after using it, I'd never go back to the old way. I love it.

Irksome, yes. But every MD I've ver used worked that way, and until now you couldn't change the levels withouth pausing either. Oh, sorry. Not every one. The ones that CBC had could be adjusted at any time, and had an actual switch for agc/manual. I don't know why they don't make it a 'sticky' setting. Most of the people I know have been complaining about this on Sony's MDs for years. Sony don't listen, do they.

The 700 I have, which I understand as being functionally the same as an 800 without radio, is the same - you have to have the unit in pause to switch to manual levels, but you can change the levels on the fly while recording. I can't attest to the other models but I believe all the Hi-MDs support this, as there are now enough controls [with the shuttle wheel on every model] to support both volume control and rec level control simultaneously.

There are several lossless formats out there. Apple lossless is good but does not compress as well as a few others. For archival purposes I use FLAC. Field recordings are often highly compressable so this means the difference between 80MB for a track and 10-20MB with no loss on a file that can be tagged and played in Winamp.

Sounds like it's the hardware, not the software at least. I'd suggest having it serviced.

I did say the words 'conclusion thus far' and that ended my part in this. It appears to me that the tracks themselves [on PC] carry their DRM info. The database is merely a reference. What we need are some people who can hack encryption.

I can't fully attest to anything, as I'm not a Mac user. That's the relevant thread to the topic.

What you're referring to as punchy sound is probably the tiny op-amps crapping out, causing soft clipping, which sounds much like brickwall dynamic range compression. Chances are, you didn't like the iPod because it was playing music that sounded the way it's supposed to, as opposed to compressed and distorted. Just my $0.02.

It is in realtime for now, yes - but as I said, the transfer is all-digital, so there are no side-effects from D/A and A/D conversion.

To note: I officially stand corrected on the issue of whether atrac3 files can be played in Hi-MD mode. I also tried encoding some songs at 132kbps atrac3 and all I can say is - I can't believe anyone even finds this acceptable for listening in a car. It's unbearable.