hobgoblin

ah, your refering to it requiring a A to A cable (A is the large head B is the small) as there is a A port on the card reader. right? i have seen those around, and there are some funny cables that can be used as a modern null-modem cable between computers to (needs special software often tho. im guessing to set up a fake network card or something). worst thing that can happen is that something shorts unless the unit have its usb power ability disconnected.

the question is, how smart is the hi-md player? i dont think its the player that messes with the secret partition but sonicstage via the special protocol. so again, did anyone find a diffrence in the usb traffic from tranfering normal files to transfering songs? that diffrence will be important if one can nail down what changes from transfer to transfer and what stays the same.

most likely the cradle is only for charging (same as with that first gen unit that had a cradle, dont recall the name right now), but that image of the "dark" side of the unit dont have any shades to indicate locations for a coverd usb port...

hmm, back to the 80's or something? whats the point of pushing netMD players when hi-md is backwards compatible (unless the latest ones dropped that)? hmm, i would have loved to find a picture of that "psyc cd boombox" talked about as they sa you can hook it to a computer... given the designs im guessing that the pysc brand referes to the expression "psyced up" or something. why? maybe its just me but the designes looks aimed at the skateboard and snowboard crowd. or any person that want to appear as if they are part of that crowd...

ah yes. i didnt factor in any cost into the list of positives and negatives. a box with 10-20 cdr's with covers (i prefer the bigger ones even tho they cant take the abuse of the thin ones, habbit i guess) or a spindle of 100 is a realy cheap option for storing stuff...

i think the real problem is that right now its only sony that makes the hi-md discs while you have atleast tdk makeing the "old" type. do anyone know if some other storage media company have picked up a licence for hi-md media production?

yep true... and i edited my post above for a breakdown of the diffrences in a nice list

the cdrw have slight problems tho, its very limited in its number of rewrites and you cant delete a file in the middle of the disc and use the empty space to write something else. both of these you get with MO... so lets break it down to points: hi-md: +small physical size +reliable long-term storage +1gb capasity +ram like rewrite +near umlimited rewrites (1000000+ i think sony have stated) -slow write speed cdrw: -not so small physical size -650MB capasity -all or nothing rewrite -limited number of rewrites (about 1000) +reliable long-term storage +fast write speed cdr: -not so small physical size -ca 700MB capasity (you can find both 650 and i think 800 capasity ones) -no rewrite -unreliable long-term storage +fast write speed as for dvdr and dvdrw (in all their mutations) i cant realy comment. most likely they are like their cd equivalent, only with bigger storage

i dont think you will see much lost data as the music upload problem comes from sonicstage not using the normal removable storage media protocol when transfering music and then failing at some stage while still setting the song on the hi-md as uploaded...

so the encryption system is more like a fingerprinting system then anything else? a recording done with the hi-md device should in theory be unlimited transferable if one finds the bits that are set to indicate its transference. but files that have been written onto the hi-md is allso encrypted using the "fingerprint" of the sonicstage that did the write? and reinstalling sonicstage changes said fingerprint (and most likely puts some checks here and there in the files to make sure that you dont change the fingerprint after the install). hell, it may even be that they dont encrypt in any way at all, but instead just tag the files with fingerprints to indicate where they are comeing from. that is unless i have skipped something and someone have allready sendt over a pcm file and seen that it changes when on the hi-md itself.

err, you can compress data into mp3 as everything is just 0 and 1. no comment on how it will sound tho and i dont think it will be reversible...

it isnt the key itself thats interesting, its the algorithm (sp?). do they use a normal cpu to handle it or do they use a special chip to do the decodeing. and if so, what will be the most cost effective way of doing it in time and power use? rember that it must be done on a file that have to be continualy read unless you have the ram to store the whole file, decode it and then feed the decoded song to the d/a converter. after compareing the hma to the pcm one should be able to, in theory atleast, build a algorithm that can copy the transformation. i wonder, can one use media formated using one sonicstage install to store files from another (i dont have a hi-md player so i cant test it. i was holding back until it was sure if we would get mp3 support or not)? and can one play media from one hi-md unit on another? if the first is no but the second is yes then most likely the key is transferd to the media at format, locking the media to a install of sonicstage. could one then do comparison of dumps of the formated but blank media from diffrent sonicstages to see where the diffrence is? most likly there is where the key is stored for use with recording and playback. turning the key more into a form of fingerprint then a encryption key. then one have the key, and then one gather up some keys and files made by the keys but with the same pcm source. then one look for patterns. if one can then nail down a kind of pattern based on the keys one can in theory recreate the algorithm used. or atleast one that behaves the same way given a key and some data. problem is that its a whole freaking lot of work...

3V should not be a problem as the usb can deliver 5V from what i have read...

going by the english part alone (i cant read that other stuff ) its neither this nor that. only thing that seems to be sure is that it will not help when it comes to writespeed, and that makes it close to useless for me. but it may well improve playback quality, so for the sound-techs it may be interesting...

i would like to see faster transfer rates. but i guess the mo media sets a hard limit there...

this is what im talking about when i say things like "given the say sony news use the english language". ie, for sony marketing, support != native playback. never underestimate marketing departments about finding new ways to use words we take for granted... right now i cant think of any other marketing department that have done a similar thing but im sure there are similar storys out there...

and i again say that we should put this tug-o-war on ice until someone here have gotten their hands on one of the players and tested it until it toss in the towel and starts playing flac

the problem with many cameraphones is the total lack of autofocus and similar systems that are default in most compacts to help the user take nice snapshots.

alltho you can store video files on it and play em back on a computer

you may be right, but only way to tell for sure is if someone gets their hands on a player and trys to play a vbr mp3 on them. i do wonder why no mp3 players can handle vbr tho, is it something with the design of the decoder chips maybe? something about haveing diffrent paths on the chip for diffrent bitrates?

knowing how sony news releases use the english language i would say that its just one source at a time. or if you can do them all the same same time then it most likely gets turned into one big bit stream before encoded and written. running 4 seperate recordings onto the same md would require four seperate encoder chips and a assload of ram to act as a buffer as the write prosess of a md is anything but fast, and writeing 4 seperate files dont help. most likely they would have written simultaneous or something if you could record 4 seperate streams at ones. so i think that its basicly just a list of available inputs on the unit.

anyone planing to do a stresstest on the latest software and see if they have nailed that tracktrashing bug?

ok so maybe i have a diffrent listening style then you people then. i listen to music to zone out or focus on what im doing, not to use it as a background music like in some hollywood movie. that, and i dont have a music collection that is even close to filling a ipod mini, much less a full size one.

only real positive ability md have over cd/dvd-r(w) is the ability of being a RAM device, not a worm device. oh, and it can take a bit more beating. guess it comes from the fact that MO media is the media of choice for backups these days

whenever i hear a compaint about carrying around a number of MDs to have the same storage as the ipod i wonder who in the world have ever filled up the ipod, much less with legal music. if we go by 1 MB pr min of sound we are looking at what? 30 000 min of music? now who spends so much time away that they have time to listen all that? soldiers in the field? you will most likely burn out the battery before you run out of music. and that review sounds more like a paper preview, much like what we find here on the forum. the cnet person most likely have looked at the specs and done some "educated" guesswork. given the size of a MD player it would be more correct to compare them to a ipod mini as you cant fit a fullsize ipod in anything but a bigish jacket pocket. and then your looking at what? 5-6 HI-MD before your at equal storage? yes you have to replace the medium, but that just allows one to make never ending mixes of music im holding back on the question of mp3 drag n drop-ability until i can see some posts here about people useing sonicstage 3.0 with a 2. gen unit. before that its all guesswork...