Hi, I've been reading this forum and so far have found it very helpful. Thank you! You're all way more helpful than Sony!
About two years ago I bought a black NetMD MZ-N707. I bought it to do a four hour continuous recording once a week. I wanted to do a high-quality, stereo live recording every week and to archive it. In the past year, I've started to do more with the recording which includes breaking it up into tracks (afterwards of course) and converting it to an mp3 that I post on my website. I record it in LP-4 mode to get one continuous track of 3-4 hours.
Shortly after I bought the NetMD, I discovered that it cannot upload from MD to PC which I found to be a huge pain in the neck. What I am doing now is plugging the MD into the back of my PC from the headphone out, fastforwarding it an hour (the part I want is in the middle) and then setting it up to re-record into the PC via Soundforge as a wav. From there I convert to mp3 in one track for my website, and break the recording up into tracks in Soundforge to burn a cd.
This re-recording is a pain in the neck. It takes about 10 minutes just to ffwd to the spot I want, and then I am worried that I am losing sound quality by re-recording. Recently, the unit has been acting up where it stops randomly for no reason. Since I am re-recording an hour-long set, I usually set it up and then walk away, so I have to come back and hit play while Soundforge has just recorded a big gap which I have to edit later. Doing this EVERY WEEK is totally time consuming and I hate it. If the format is digital, I shouldn't have to resample it! I might as well have recorded to cassette tape!
I want to get a new unit and I was looking at the Hi-MD to see if it could solve the problems I have. I want to upload the entire track to a PC to edit - I can't handle the buttons on the tiny MD unit, which were made for editing and trackmarking as you go, not after the fact, and are not as precise as software - and then I want to convert parts of the track to wav and mp3 files WITHOUT resampling. I read about the HiMDRenderer and the new Sony Wav conversion program but I am really scared about what some people have mentioned as "trashing" of files. These are live recordings that cannot be reproduced. I could back them up, but not if it means resampling in realtime (in which case there would be no point to me upgrading to HiMD).
Please help!