smkranz

The answer to attenuator vs. battery box is one of budget and your own preferences & your satisfaction with your results, which you won't know until you try making a couple of recordings. Some people swear by the attenuator, others say a battery box, or a mic pre-amp with variable gain, is the best. As the post copied below suggests, to record rock (loud & amplified) concerts *try* the inexpensive Radio Shack attenuator first before spending extra money on a battery box or a pre-amp. For your mics, Sound Professionals has a variety starting at about $50. Check this page: http://www.soundprofessionals.com/cgi-bin/...tegory/110/mics If you are likely to need stealth in order to avoid detection, you should also consider their in-ear mics for $69. I love the recordings I get from mine. But any of the clip-ons will likely do you right as well. Since I haven't tried any but the in-ear mics, I really don't know if the differences between the $50 or $100 models is significant. My inclination is to suggest you get the most expensive mics you can afford...maybe by going with the inexpensive attenuator vs. the battery box will let you afford more costly mics? *** 2) Music Music is the trickiest thing to record. The preamp in the MD recorder is pretty good except for one main problem: It can't handle bass. So for most music the signal coming into it has to be lowered so that it won't simply overload. There are a few ways to do this. The cheapest and most portable one is to use an attenuator, which attenuates (lowers) the signal across the board. Say hello to the Radio Shack Headphone Volume Control, $6.59 anywhere. Plug the mic into the RSHVC plug. Turn its volume knob all the way UP (it's still attenuating because you're running it backwards from its usual function) and plug it into the mic jack. Unfortunately, these little gizmos are flimsy and wear out, turning staticky or losing a channel; get a spare. The SP-ATEN sold by Sound Professionals is exactly the same thing without the Radio Shack logo. Someday one of the companies catering to MD recording will make a more reliable attenuator. Another method is to use a bass roll-off filter, available from recording-gear places like Sound Professionals, Microphone Madness, Church Audio, Giant Squid Audio Labs, Core-Sound, etc. This fights the bass problem by limiting the amount of bass that gets through. The downside is that the bass is then absent from the recording, which can sound tinny. A third method is to get a battery box, which provides power to the microphones that improves their response to loud sounds. For loud music, Mic-->Battery box-->LINE-in provides a good sounding but relatively quiet recording. For quieter music, you can try Mic-->Battery box-->Mic-in but you still risk overloading with bass. Many battery boxes and preamps also include bass roll-off for this reason. Bottom line: Start with mic and RS attenuator and see if it works for you. Settings: Go via Menu to REC Set. Under Mic Sens, select LOW. On Hi-MD, make sure Rec Mode is better than Hi-LP (Hi-SP or PCM); on regular MD, make sure it's LP2 or SP. Plug in the mic. Press REC/Pause(||) (time display will blink) and go via Menu to Rec Set and choose Rec Volume. Switch from Automatic (the default) to Manual, Enter, and look at the level meter. (AGC can't handle sudden impacts, like bass-drum thumps, and makes a bad whooshing noise, so Manual Volume is a must.) Adjust the volume (with pointing stick >ENT or wheel on Hi-MD, |<< and >>| on NetMD) so that the level meter is visibly changing with its maximum between the two dashes on Hi-MD or about half to three-quarters to the peak on MD. Un-Pause to start recording. The recording volume setting depends on your mic, the music's volume, and what's in the circuit between the mic and the mic jack. If you are using basic binaural mics (Sound Pro BMC-2 or similar) and the RS attenuator, then try a Rec Volume of 20/30 on Hi-MD (or 2/3 of the way up on the bar-graph display of a standard MD) for a typical rock concert.

My newest toy (dang...if the MZ-RH1 doesn't hit U.S. vendors soon, my Toys For Tots Me fund will be dreadfully depleted). This is my first GPS experience, and being easily amused, this thing is a hoot. I use it with my Palm T5. Palm recently lowered its price on this to $180, I bought for $156 (delivered) from www.pagecomputers.com. It uses TomTom Navigator 5 software (included), and overall it really seems to be a solid package. I'm playing around with getting it to connect (bluetooth) to my cell phone, to allow additional ($$) services including Traffic and Weather. There's a 30-day free trial for such services, which will be just right for a long upcoming road trip. [attachmentid=1768]

Download links to music files in the Gallary are missing again...

I (stupidly) trusted the Spousal Unit to record the kid's *last* high school Jazz Ensemble concert last night, without first going over the instructions with her...again. 55 minutes of dead air. She probably plugged the mic into something other than Mic In.

The letter certainly portrays a nightmare scenario. Jadeclaw is right on the money...don't talk to anyone [at least, not before you are paid ...just kidding there...) But it is only one side of the story. I must say that when he first got the phone call from someone who identified himself as a lawyer looking for his information and opinions, common sense in today's world should have told him to shut up. Instead, it sounds like he probably bit on the chance (at least at that moment) to be -- or at least sound -- authoritative on the subject. It also sounds to me like his own lawyer might not have clued him in as to exactly what he should expect to happen once he sued these two class-action law firms. After all, they're not playing "nice" with him because he (rightly or wrongly) impugned (what's left of) their professional ethics, is a potential challenge their income stream, and possibly also made claims of ethical breaches to their states' respective bar assocations, all of which lawyers tend to take very personally.

Watching an Andy Griffith Show marathon on TV Land! Woo-hoo! My day is made, and it's not even 9 am. Right now, Andy & Miss Crump, Barny and Thelma-Lou were out on a picnic when Andy & Miss Crump were caught in a land-slide inside a cave. They made a safe escape out a back way, but poor Barney didn't know it and has organized the entire town in rescue efforts. Hearing about their own "rescue" on the radio, Andy & Miss Crump save Barny's reputation by sneaking back into the cave to allow themselves to be "rescued". That Andy is one good egg.

Or looking at it another (the right) way, you just did some of the repair work *for* them . Honestly, it seems like it's worth an email to ask if they could take pity on you to repair/replace under the warranty, even if you did dismantle it. Seventy bucks is worth saving if you can.

I assume you've confirmed this, but just in case not, are you outside the two-year warranty they come with?

The blood-sucking, bottom-dwelling bastards at the RIAA (and their lawyer$) are at it again. Now they are claiming that XM Satellite's handheld "Inno", which receives XM signals and can apparently record the same music whicht XM has already paid licensing fees to broadcast, allows subscribers to illegally replay those tunes without paying additional licensing fees. The action is aimed at getting XM to pay additional licensing fees for the devices. http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/S/SAT...-05-17-04-17-19 It is crap like this that drives law-abiding and sensible folks crazy, and makes me want to stand on a street corner in Manhattan handing out bootleg copies of their precious CDs.

Awoke this morning to the following email from Sound Professionals announcement of a "Half-Price" Sale of a MZ-M100 Bundle (with mic and headphones) for $299. Hmmm, they have a funny way of cyphering "half-price", but if you need or want the phones, and considering that Sound Pros sells those same phones normally for $99 (anyone know if they're any good??), then I guess you could consider this a half-price sale of the headphones, 'cuz Minidisco sells the MZ-M100 and the mic for $250...: ##### Important Newsletter regarding HiMD recorders! We'll keep this short and sweet(look for a regular newsletter soon, though).This is a special Newsletter to announce a great deal that is about to end on the Sony HiMD recorder MZ-M100. If you haven't already had a chance to see this,here's the deal: Sony is about to release the latest HiMD model, the MZ-RH1. However, they overproduced on the current MZ-M100 "professional" model that is Mac and PC compatible. To move these out to make room for the new model, they made us a great HALF-PRICE deal. They are throwing in a FREE stereo microphone and a FREE set of Sony MDR-7506 professional studio headphones! These headphones are the standard in the professional recording world and are truly amazing. They are lightweight and foldup for each storage. The mic is a good entry level stereo cardioid mic. The recorder is Sony's current top-of-the-line model. The price on the special HALF-PRICE bundle is $299.00 while supplies last only! When the supply of these are gone, so is this deal. http://www.soundprofessionals.com/cgi-bin/...Y-MZ-M100-PROMO

I likewise use Nero (ver. 6) for CD and DVD burning, and music file editing. The product I was using prior to Nero, primarily for compiling and burning DVDs, was Pinnacle Studio (v. 8, I believe) which I ordered (not knowing any better) with the Gateway 'puter I bought 4-5 years ago now. That software was without a doubt the most unstable POS I ever tried to love, and was responsible for: * high blood pressure; * grey hairs; * the loss of *at least* three years from my life expectancy; * routine system freezes and crashes; * many (many) silver coasters (i.e. bad/corrupted/unplayable burns). The only thing I miss about Pinnacle Studio is that it had extremely flexible DVD menu capabilities (when it worked). With Nero, I have yet to figure out a way to create a DVD menu that doesn't use thumbnails (i.e. pictures), rather than just letting me create a list of titles. Maybe the new version 7 does, I dunno? It also doesn't allow you to use different fonts/colors for different menu elements. I guess Nero could be considered "bloated" with a bunch of stuff you might not want. But it is rock-solid, seems fairly intuitive to me and it does what I ask it do reliably and quickly. So as Dex suggests, just don't install those things you don't want. BTW, in case you haven't played with it, the single coolest program I use, which works very nicely in tandem with Nero, is a freebie called DVD Shrink which is still widely available. [i suppose DVD Shrink is now considered *verboten* because it allows you to make backup copies of *most* commercial DVDs by circumventing those gnarly copy protection schemes...which I must say it does very effectively...] You can backup an entire disc, or "reauthor" it and only take the parts you want, and either burn them onto recordable media at customizable compression ratios, with excellent results, or write them to a folder on your computer for later use. If you have Nero installed, DVD Shrink automatically hooks into Nero's burning engine and...it's just a beautiful thing. Totally off topic, I guess, but I'd read somewhere that the fella who wrote DVD Shrink...from Denmark or Germany or somewhere...actually went to work for Ahead Software (developers of Nero) which is when further development of DVD Shrink came to a schreeching halt.

All better now, thanks!

I can get into each gallery, but there are no links to download any of the music files. Can't find any setting I've changed.

There are no links to any of the live music uploaded to the Gallery.

AudioCubes is now showing the MZ-RH1 on its site at U.S. $429. These are imported from Japan. They show available colors black or silver: http://www.audiocubes.com/product/Sony_MZ-...-MD_Player.html (sorry if this info is redundant...I've been checking their site regularly and just saw it posted there today for the first time) Me personally, I'll await the U.S. release rather than pay $130 more for the privilege of being the first on my block (err...first in the county...first in the State?) to have one.

Sound Professionals' $299 price includes either your choice of one of their "single point stereo" microphones (which they sell for $40) -or- a $20 discount off any other mic...or with no mic at all. I don't need any other mics, and asked if they are going to sell it without a mic for any less than $299. The answer I got back was basically, "no".

The Sony (US) warranty is 90 days on labor, one year on parts. If you purchased an extended warranty, better find it. Or if you purchased it with a credit card that offers an automatic warranty extension (i.e. AMEX, maybe others), you can exercise some rights there. Sounds to me like your unit is having "issues" which will not get better on their own. BTW, if you bought yours at a brick & mortar shop in Maryland, I'd love to know where.

Same thing happened to me with a live concert recording I had made using my NH900, on a disc which I had previously used many times without problems. It failed to upload one (the second) of four tracks on the Hi-MD. The rest went fine. I tried to rename the track, move it out of the group, etc. to no avail. Opted to try playing the track on the NH900 and recording in real time via USB using Total Recorder. The track was 16 minutes long. It played until about the 12 minute point, at which time the MD just stopped playback...no error message or nuthin. I fiddled around with the playback progress slider in Sonic Stage (same version as yours). It seems there was a segment of the track about 25 seconds long, which just would not play back for inexplicable reasons (I'm speculating some type of data corruption or physical damage?)...I incrementally moved the slider ahead a few seconds each time, and playback would try to start, then just stop. I finally reached a point where playback would resume normally through the rest of the track. That point was about 25 seconds after the glitch began. I resumed recording the rest of the track from that point forward, then combined them in Nero Wave Editor. *Fortunately* the music at either end of the splice was close enough to make the resulting edited track sound passable. My conclusion is that it's a disc and/or a recording problem that has nothing to do with Sonic Stage. So, try playing back the troublesome track on the RH10 with Sonic Stage while it's connected via USB. You might be able to salvage it by recording in real-time and finding/bypassing a bad part of the recording as described above.

...sure looks pretty. I think I want that. But sadly, the Spousal Unit would kick my a** clear to Hong Kong if I ever (ever,ever,ever,ever,ever) made the mistake of buying it. Dang... http://www.sonystyle.com/is-bin/INTERSHOP....hero4A-NavU_GPS -or- http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000E15EJ...5Fencoding=UTF8

Happy Friday. I just recorded a live concert using my NH900 and connected to my PC to upload via SS 3.4. Four tracks. Walked away while the upload ran. When I came back there was a message that an error occurred in the transfer. Only the first, and the last two tracks uploaded. The second track did not. Upon trying again, the Transfer status bar on SS immmediately jumped to 30%...then went slowly...until the same error message came back, and the track still didn't transfer. I tried renaming it and removing it from its group...no dice. So I started to play the track and record via USB and Total Recorder. All went well until about the 11:55 point (it's a 16 minute long track). Then playback just stopped, without an error message. After fiddling around and trying again a few times, I started moving the playback slider in Sonic Stage to various points *after* 11:55. If I tried to resume playback at any point before about 12:35, it would start playing again for a nanosecond, then stop again. But trying it at about 12:35, it resumed normal playback through the rest of the track. I don't know how these things work internally, but this seems to suggest that either there is a bad "sector" (is that the right nomenclature?) on the disc or something else caused some sort of corruption in the data between 11:55 - 12:35 of the recording. Any ideas? Should I toss the disc? I have used this particular Hi-MD as my primary "live recording" disc without problems in the past. TIA...

Today was a "sit & watch a few flicks with a few beers" kind of Sunday. The beers were Hooegarden ( ), a coupla Clipper City Golds, and Sierra Nevada IPA. If you haven't had it yet, it is -nowhere- near as good as regular Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. The films of choice were O Brother, Where Art Thou, and Spiderman.

I have found a portable AA charger similar to those ( www.gomadic.com ) to be indispensible with my Palm T5 on long trips. But the primary "useability" difference IMHO between the Palm and a minidisc recorder is that the Palm doesn't have a removeable battery, i.e. it MUST be recharged or powered from an external source. The RH1, in contrast, uses a battery that is removeable and replaceable, so for me the best solution will be to bring along a second (and maybe third) fully-charged battery instead of carrying a very clunky (and un-stealthful) AA power source.

Here is a current auction for one on eBay. If you click on the seller's history, you will see that his other recent auctions for this same item have been going for about $40-55 including shipping. That's a boat-load less than what I paid for mine. http://cgi.ebay.com/Brand-NEW-Silver-SONY-...1QQcmdZViewItem

You are much better off setting it where you know you'll get a decent recording (like around 11-12 as you discovered), and leaving it alone, rather than changing settings mid-way. Depending on what kind of concert it is, what kind of hall you're in, where you are sitting, etc. it won't take you long to know what's right. As for using a remote, I have the 3-line MC40ELK remote which displays recording levels quite nicely. But it also can add noise to recordings (something to do with the changing LCD on the remote), so I don't use it for recording any more .

I have a better copy of this one at home, but you'll get the idea. You might have to listen *twice* to hear the second bodily emission near the end... http://www.vidstogo.com/player.php?vfname=...mercial&ext=wmv