Kouby

From a Sony point of view, MD blanks can go through about a million re-recordings. So the technology itself is reliable. It all depends on the quality of the blank itself, professional disks such as the Sony ES series would probably last longer than cheap ones. From my point of view I still have MD blanks bought in 1997 for which I've done endless recordings and erases, and they still behave and sound like brand new. And I've always gone for if not the cheapest, at least reasonnably priced blanks.

WinNMD is currently not compatible with Hi-MD units.

Nice tip you got there Unless Sony can provide us with his WAV Converter in the near future, using Directshow filters to convert OMA to WAV is indeed a lot better than the non-free, Total Recorder method. btw, did it work for your two tracks (the PCM and the Hi-SP ones) or just one of the two?

This would obviously mean having some software encoder going from AAC to LP2... I certainly wouldn't want to buy that kind of creepy sound...

hehe, as skyther pointed out in another board, this is based on his own experience. And my own early tests (using SS as I don't have a Hi-MD) tend to confirm that SP still sounds a bit better than Hi-SP. I intend to do a full ABX test involving Hi-SP (recorded with Sonicstage), Type-R SP (I can digitally record from my deck to my PC) and others competitors such as Lame, MPC and Vorbis, at high quality settings. Such a test has never been done I believe, it could be interesting.

Indeed. Not only does it have problems with VBR files, it also can't handle perfectly fine CBR files on many occasions. I would ditch Sonicstage alltogether and go with Simpleburner...

Have you tried recording on your JB-920 or did you just try to play an already recorded 80 min disc? This whole 80 min blanks incompatibility issues is very weird, I've never heard of it for any unit. In fact, my MZ-R30 (quite older than you JB-920) plays and records on 80 min disks just fine, and so did my previous deck (JE510).