ROMBUSTERS

ya im pretty sure you'll be fine

maybe it contains the physical disc location of the audio being read (i.e. trkidx = track index)? or is this information read elsewhere?

my point was more so regarding sonys politics than random technology

Also can't Ipods play back WAVs natively or am I mistaken? And while the sound 'quality' may not be as good on the Ipod as it is with MD, Ipods can put out a LOT more volume than MD even at level 30

convert to WAV > then back to MP3 or atrac

agreed, although Sony owns the rights to MiniDisc and what they say goes, including the codecs, etc

Ipods are capible of Apple Lossless (which is a perfect PCM only compressed) so there is no difference between the two devices sound quality. However the Ipod audio driver has been critized for being to blah unlike Sony's sound equipment

The PSP uses drag and drop but i agree with your point

SP2 can only help, sounds like a faulty driver, i would try reupdating the graphics drivers

sounds like one of the components of SonicStage is messed up, try uninstalling and reinstalling and make sure your computer doesnt reboot or go into stand by/hibernation while it is plugged in

it always decodes the music file to PCM before rencoding it as Atrac. The Atrac bitrate only determines how much information is retained out of that new PCM audio

ya sharp has been 'working' on HiMD stuff since it was first announced and yet nothing has become available yet

while this has no techical evidence, wouldn't it make sense for the units codecs and its volumes to be completely seperate values? are you sure you didnt change anything else in the settings? i think the only way to really change everyhting back would be to go through ever value individually and set them back to the initial ones via the same way you changed the value in the first place

also make sure the MD is NOT plugged in when the computer reboots or goes into Standby/Hibernation

run windows update, install SonicStage 3.1, run ad-ware and virus scanners also remember that a badly fragmented MD will not give as much space for audio as one that is not so fragmented (read the manual)

because it would cost an arm and a leg

i have noticed that AGC does cause portions of the music to PLAY louder than others however this is just a results of the AGC compensating for the varying volume levels of the source audio

Besides the deleting stuff from your HDD without your knowledge, the rest of your claims regarding MP3s, as dex has stated, are just from lack of understanding of the product before you made your purchase. The HiMD system is an all-encrypted portable music recorder. Support for MP3, just like Atrac, changes nothing but the available codecs on the recorder.

I think your best bet is to create a special MD just for going to sleep. Record the length of time you want on it (hey you could even use MD mode SP and that would give you 60/74/80min worth of recording which is just about what you wanted). After it has played through all of the tracks (providing Normal Repeate isnt on) it will stop and shut itself off

I believe that is the Hi-MD PLAYER (not recorder) i could be mistaken however

see thats wut i never understood. this is a fault with Sony's mechanics Every MD song is buffered (its part of the original MD specifications). While this buffering amount varies (based on unit and codec, i.e. Atrac3+64kbps would hold more music in the same amount of memory than Atrac3+ 256kbps). When you listen to your MD, the music you hear is not coming from the disc, but rather the memory chip inside the unit. This is also why MDs rarely skip. When a song is fast forwarded why doesnt the unit just speed up the playback from the buffer? I guess it makes sense to move the laser in case you go past the buffered amount, but it should at least start from within the buffer and move the laser while its doing this.

those are non-DRM OMAs though right? PS: does that even exist??

I agree to an extent The reason the seek time is slow, is because Sony uses a low-power drive motor system, this is the reason it takes about 1 second to seek from the edge of the disc to the center (and vise versa). However if they put a more powerful motor in the play time would also decrease accordingly

i've noticed this problem as well (far back into SonicStage 2.#) this is a method that seems to work all the time 1. While on the CD import screen take out the disc 2. Wait until the screen refreshes and says no disc inserted (may require a couple seconds) 3. Insert new CD SS also has poor handling of multiple CDROM drives so if you plan on importing try and only have one CD in all of your drives. Normally SS tries to overlap the drives in the window (which doesnt make sense). Anyways best of luck

is the information from the trkdx file encoded? if so maybe the device requires multiple keys or support data in order to make sure everything is going smoothly (although that seems like a bit of overkill)