Seikeden

subdued response: thanks sony. thank you for building an excellent device, smaller, better manufactured and of sturdier construction than anyone else. thanks for engineering something that should have been able to fulfill all my needs. thank you sony for wrapping every useful feature of said device up in so much red tape i had to rely on other users to hack claimed functionality out of it. MD is dead? you killed it. i want to play my music? CAN'T want to record... yeah AS LONG AS YOU DON'T PLAN ON KEEPING IT! putting my nz1 in the collection pile. maybe some idiot like jpteasy will buy it a few years from now.

My (limited) experience with file transfers and my mz-nh1 was- Around the 1MB mark for file uploads, slower when downloading to MD, and from what I could tell, yeah music transfers from sonicstage seem to go somewhat faster.

About the usb connector on the NH1.. for the australian version at least, its not a "custom" connection, it's actually some sort of wierd standard usb plug for mobile devices, i found a cable with the exact same clip attachment the other day, for a laptop usb Nic

Oh yes of course I'm doing that now.. another annoyance though and it wont save the hundreds of files I just nuetered ^^

There is this giant blue bug on my computer right now called sonicstage 3.1 .. (j/k) ok seriously- Sonicstage irretrievably alters any media files it indexes/imports. yes the source ones. This is great if you rely on hash checks to maintain authenticity. The thing runs like it's on a PII, on my athlon 2600XP. I Rename one file and it mysteriously accesses the harddisk for about 20 seconds. every thing you do in it seems to take an unimaginably long time, AND carries the added bonus of making your compuiter unusable while its doing whatever its doing. Whenever I put a file to md it makes a copy.. there's no option to delete the copy after transfer, I cannot make a new copy without deleting the old *new* copy, there's no easy way to do that effectively. The database...ohhh the database.. :'( where's the work button damn it? The SonicStage team is now on my hitlist. They've had enough time to fix, and only made things worse. The sooner someone makes an outlaw alternative to SS the better. I'll glady pay to get this bloated piece of DRM spyware non working useless crap off my pc. thank you sony ..|.

if it's the case that md units just use a single cpu to process data.. then what's stopping sony from adding mp3 support to older decks? Oh they made sure you can never update the firmware cos they're paranoid that someone might try to use their hardware to its true potential?

It's interesting that they care so much about hardware performance/power consumption issues and the necessity for an effective hardware solution.. yet it's like they hired a team of %$#* monkeys to do the pc side of things.. (which to be quite honest, is EVERYTHING to hi-md.) sorry im in a rant mood, I just found out sonicstage alters mp3 files it indexes, so they fail hash checks.. AND one of my older recordings saved in lovely oma format is now apparently incompatible with the new sonicstage GRRRR

for my minidisc :/ Thingy. Damn its cool. Any word?

hmm. I Believe I can tell the difference between 256k atrac 3+ and pcm. Mostly because imo the emphasis on the compression is getting a crisp mid range and eliminating bad sounds in the higher range. Whereas I love my bass and the difference is clear. Not all the time of course. 3+ sometimes just has that metallicy echoey feel to it. On the other hand, I find that lp2 is sometimes indistinguishable from the source media (using the headphones i got with my nh1 and in a train for e.g. ) so im more than happy to use it for listening to outside. It absolutely fails when you ask it to do something jazzy though. Still don't know why there's no 192k atrac option. Also wouldn't it be nice if we could use any format we want? oh well :/ edit: oh yeah so my point is; Do I choose to listen to.. - 256k atrac3+.. makes me uneasy, bad bass sometimes? or -64k LP2.. Equal to 256 most of the time, 1/4 the size? I know what I choose to use.

It bothers me they put enter on the remote twice but menu only once, and you have to hold it in. I was having som,e trouble getting to menu without inadvertantly pausing the playback, but tapping display first seems to work. its a strange beast but give it time and I suppose you get used to the quirks.

did you just pull it out of the box? I remember having to set the menu 'mode' the very first time I used it, before it would do anything. This doesn't sound the same though :/

how come i didnt get a free hi-md with my nh1? arrrrrrrrr yar

confirmed. I just got it too. THX MICROSOFT :/ edit: gwar does anyone know exactly which hotfixes to uninstall? I have about 20 of em and I'm not sure which are the offending articles edit2: ok here are the offending items- - Security Update for Windows 2000 (KB841356) - Security Update for Windows 2000 (KB840987) - Security Update for Windows 2000 (KB841533) I uninstalled the hotfix for KB841533 last, and sonicstage is working fine now, without reinstalling. Not sure if its just that one. The updates are recommended by microsoft for install on all windows systems except for those running Windows XP sp2 This may be in need of an announcement somewhere as I suspect there'll be a lot of ungry 2000 and XP users in the next couple of days.

Yeah, well coming up with fun things to do with my md and I thought of this.. playing back music through my pc headphones (nice sennheisers) from md through the usb functionality. Why? Well I enjoy listening to mp3's on my pc constantly, only the slight cpu overhead + constant disc access makes it a nuisance when playing games at the same time. Technically I should be able to playback off the md without either of these things right? Well except soundstage isn't exactly a small or stable or efficient program Can anyone confirm if this *might* be possible.. not using realplayer as I wouldn't touch anything real puts out with my 100 feet poking stick. Otherwise Line out through the soundcard is a pretty good option. >.>

9.95 AUD here I want some!

hmm I'm not a sound engineer or anything but from what I could see in that first bunch of tests... -Atrac 3+ 256kb has suspiciously low and noisy looking reproduction from 19500-22k, whereas hi-lp pretty much excludes anything from 18k upwards :/ -the sweep test is completely irrelevant as a sweep sound curve should be almost the most compressable thing ever. Atrac3 and apparently atrac type-r as well cheat and eliminate most stereo seperation in mid frequencies, but probably only when it can be done without losing *additional* sounds. (extrapolated from data) I'm gonna look into this some more and see if i can confirm the mid frequency oddities.. As for aural tests I can confirm that v high frequency noises are sometimes muffled if not eliminated entirely by atrac compression and not by mp3. I have quite a few tracks withs record hiss and its just mysteriously eliminated when converted to atrac good if I had a live recording but bad if it was intentional. Come to think of it thats probably a feature more than anything since you dont have to piss around with high pass filters afterwards !!! ;P The other disturbing thing I noticed about ATRAC3 was the first track I stuck on minidisc, at atrac3+ 256k, Angel - Massive Attack, which opens with a very low muffled bass riff, mysteriously obtained a buzzing sound all over the low note, which pissed me off, I couldn't tell the difference at all in 192k mp3.

as for legality.. well marc didn't do any reverse engineering right? he's simply using some of sony's freely provided tools in a way that gives a result they should do right out of the box?.. >.>

cool. I'll check it out now

I'll be using mine primarily as a take anywhere, easy option and if need be, *high quality* recording device for dj sets. optical input is spiffy too but I don't think I'll have a chance to use that for a while. just being able to rock up at a party, plug the little baby into the rec out of any mixer, push record then come back in a couple of hours... well I don't think theres anything that beats that. Can't imagine playing much music on it except for long trips.

hah... well after a harrowing few hours of searching the net hoping for a solution to my new shiny md's little um handicap, I found it, right back where I started Thanks MarC, You're a champ. now proud owner of a new mz-nh1.. Can't wait to record some dj sets this saturday.