ozpeter

As memory serves me, 23 is the factory default - you didn't need to test! Of course ideally it shouldn't have a level setting anyway on a digital input, but it resamples everything anyway, so apart from the convenience of optical, it's not that much better than an analog input.

Tandy / RadioShack used to carry an optical switch box for selecting one from about four inputs. I did see it sometime in 2006, I'm pretty sure.

Reaper.

Congratulations. This is one of the more intelligently active (if you know what I mean) boards I visit and I've sure learned a lot here. And spent a lot on the basis of what I've learned...

So what sort of quality and control of level etc do you get from the recording cradle, or is that something you have to buy extra?

I have a Philips DCC deck that plays normal cassettes as well, and converts to digital while it does so - so as well as audio outputs it has a SPDIF (not optical) output as well. So I still keep it as a normal cassette player. Somewhere I do have some DCC unused blanks but will keep them another 20 years and then sell at vast cost to some DCC freak somewhere...

It really depends on whether running the mic unbalanced (using a cable as suggested above) will matter. If the lead is quite short, you should be able to get away with it, without picking up too much hum and buzz. But if the mic is on a long lead, you would indeed first need to run it into a balanced input on a mixer, then from the mixer at line level unbalanced on a short lead to the MD recorder.

(Re the NW-HD1 firmware upgrade to provide mp3 native playback - the local service agent says on the phone that the upgrade is free if the unit is under guarantee, and takes about 24 hrs. I can't resist anything free - so I'll give the offer a try as soon as their relevant staff member is back at work next week).

Thanks for the comments and advice on the NW-HD1 - I'm in Australia. There's a agent not far away from here who should be able to advise me on the local situation (which I'll report here FWIW). I only use the SonicStage library for my own live recordings - all my CDs are ripped in mp3 format. So I'm faced with transcoding, or re-ripping, or the upgrade, or using it for the classical stuff I've never ripped. A brief experiment with transcoding indicated that it's not a total disaster for casual listening, but there's the psychological thing of knowing that it's transcoded... When it comes to size, indeed there's a problem with tiny players simply getting lost. Advice seems to be to always leave the headphones attached!

I downloaded 4.0 from this site (MDCF) recently when 4.2 threw up runtime errors, and it saved my life! - so thanks from me for that, while we're broadly on the topic.

I cannot for a minute imagine MD taking off now for portable playback purposes. For Christmas, in response to a major hint, Mrs Oz gave me my first iPod, one of the new generation Shuffles, the one with a clip. It's the clip that made me ask for it - I can clip it to my shirt or whatever and I don't know it's there. The control buttons can be operated without looking at them (importantly the pause button in particular is easy to locate by touch when Mrs Oz wishes to speak to me...). It loads quickly and simply via iTunes and having ripped all our CDs to mp3 some time ago, there's no work to do on that front. Sound quality is perfectly fine as far as I am concerned, and it will drive full size Sennheiser HD580 high quality cans to too-high levels (unlike any MD device I have). I can't think of any reason why I'd weigh myself down with an MD player for personal audio now - despite owning an RH-1, and NH-1, and an NH900. But for recording - no contest, particularly as the iPod doesn't record! By the way - just before Christmas I acquired a Sony NW-HD1 20gig player, which was being cleared locally at only 1.4 times the price of the 2nd gen iPod Shuffle. There's a sign of the times. Probably going cheap as it transcodes, slowly, mp3 to ATRAC when you load it via SonicStage, which for most people is a no-no. Just not in the same league of usability as the tiny iPod as a music player. But I couldn't resist the bargain! Might see if I can find someone doing the firmware upgrade to enable mp3 native playback though.

Elsewhere on that site I have now spotted single Hi-MD disks at the new price. So... that's the deal, as warned previously in this thread! But the site needs an update to get rid of that depressing "we're not even listing any" message.

Just went to the Minidisc Australia site to order some Hi-MD's and it says "there are no products in this category". Gulp. I nearly ordered some last week, put it off for some reason and now.... ?? Wassup, Sefu?

The market penetration of Hi-MD (if not plain MD) was never enough to guarantee that in "x" number of years time you'd still be able to get the media and the machines - unlike say DVD and CD and perhaps VHS (which will rapidly suffer from being a non-digital medium). So, I'd regard any kind of MD medium as being for temporary storage, not for archive. I've got about 20 Hi-MD's (and hundreds of plain ones) and as I acquire new material I dump it to PC and/or CD or DVD if I think I'll want to keep it. Otherwise I just keep it until I've been round the circle of the 20 discs.

Maybe if they had lowered their costs by sticking to one or two designs, they might still be in the market...

Hmm, maybe whatever fried is leaking current (partial short) and thus the battery life is minimal.

Sounds like they had some ex-Sony people to advise them on their DRM policies... praise be that Sony have now wised up about that kind of sales-denting stuff.

No, it can't be turned off (despite occasional rumours to the contrary). There's a freeware program called "mediajoin" out there somewhere which is good for quickly stitching the tracks into one after downloading to PC. Or open them in Reaper (www.reaperaudio.com) (DAW program with unlimited free trial, but pay the $40 if you really use it) which, if set right in preferences, will put the files one next to the other on a single track, and you can do what you like from there, then use File > Render to mix it down to a single new file. And there's a utility called ReaBurn (written by yours truly) which enables stuff prepared in Reaper easily to be burned to CD.

Reaper is a superb audio editor - www.reaperaudio.com - not freeware, $40, but you can evaluate it for as long as you need in a fully functional state.

http://forums.minidisc.org/index.php?showt...mp;#entry107754 has the answer.

Reaper is now my favourite audio editing app for concert material and for speech editing too. www.reaperaudio.com - about a 1Mb download, $40 for non-pro use, but you can take as long as you want to evaluate it. Some of the recently added editing features really are superb. And ReaBurn, a third party app you can track down on the Reaper site, handles the CD burning side of things. If you tried earlier versions and didn't stick with it, look again.

Just about any MD should provide an output when recording. Some models - perhaps all Hi-MD ones?? - have a menu option to enable line out vs headphone out. Sensitivity setting should not affect the overall quality - put it like this, what would affect the overall quality would be overloading the recording due to using high sensitivity with a high level recording, or under-recording using low sensitivity with a low level signal. You simply need to use the one that is most appropriate to the incoming level. I'd avoid having settings of (say) 10/30 9on loud stuff) or below or 25/30 or above (on quiet stuff), so pick a sensitivity which avoids those extremes, or something near them.

Try the Rode Stereo VideoMic or the Rode NT4 (reviewed at http://www.digitalplayroom.com/rode/Review...T4&5p1.htm)

This comes up reasonably frequently here - some examples:- http://forums.minidisc.org/index.php?showt...amples&st=0 http://forums.minidisc.org/index.php?showt...mp;hl=resamples http://forums.minidisc.org/index.php?showt...&hl=optical

More such devices: http://www.targus.com/hk/product_details.asp?sku=APB04AP http://www.mdofpc.com/onlinestore/usb-batt...ces-p-9719.html - "usb battery pack" seems to be the best search in google.