ROMBUSTERS

as far as i know with my experiences with a 1st gen hiMD recorder (MZ-NH700) you can ONLY set bookmarks on the unit itself. And if you do ANY editing to the disc (i.e. add/remove/change order of songs, etc) it looses all of your placed bookmarks.

Regarding recording If you record from an analogue source, the HiMD's A/D Converter has to take the analogue wave form and convert it into a PCM digital source before it can compress or save the data digtially. if you record from a digital source via optical in, the source does not send a wave form through the wire but rather the digital PCM source. What this means is instead of having to use the A/D converter to turn something analogue into digital it just takes the digital information straight. 1s and 0s are sent down the wire and then save on the disc in the same way

Sony is the only known manufactuer of 1GB Hi-MD discs, however ANY legacy MD disc (60min/74min/80min) can be used in 'Hi-MD' mode

All MDs since their introduciton have included anti-shock. They now also include Sony's G-Shock mechanism. From my experiences I have never had my MD skip, while jogging, driving over crazy bumps or whatnot - although like anything with a memory buffer, they do have the 'chance' to skip. under normal use and circumstances you should never hear them skip

do you have two pieces of hardware or just one?

which is why the HiMD 1GB disc playback times are the shortest. The only difference between HiMD formatted and regular formatted MDs is the error correction employed. Although again this doesn't explain the sharp drop in playback time.

Ya but really it's all just minor things here and there until they get their act together (hopefully) with SonicStage 4

even with the dawn of HiMD many members of this bored would rate the Type-R SP codec of higher quality than it's HiMD replacement Atrac3+ 256kbps. This is because it has been so finely tuned over the years and has a more... warm feeling to it.

can you play the disc at all? and by 'play' I mean sound comes out of something? If so you could feed that sound source (digital or analogue) back into a recorder of sorts

little known fact: during the development of the CD-ROM Sony and Phillips weren't always buddy-buddy. In fact they both developed different optical disc formats. Sony's were the conventional 12cm discs we have today, while Phillips were 11 or 11.5cm. There was such a disagreement over many portions of the project that ALL companies that knew about the project decided to boycott it unless the companies worked together to avoid another betamax vs vcr fiasco. These boycotting companies included all major record labels, motion picture studios and software/hardware makers such as Microsoft and IBM. Eventually the specifications of the disc were finalized with Sony's 12cm disc being chosen (to provide 74min instead of 60min), Phillips optical disc technology (pits/lands setup, etc) with Sony's error correction and tracking software (Eight-to-Fourteen Modulation (EFM) and Cross Interleaved Reed-Solomon Code (CIRC)). ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I firmly believe that companies need to do this once again as I am NOT going to pay for two optical disc based systems and then have one suddenly go obsolete.

that only changes the 'appearance' of the disc (i.e. case) not the actual disc properties

the normalization must occure BEFORE the converstion to Atrac, there are currently no support software that will do it any other way

glad I could help to reclaim your space, you can delete the files through SonicStage (right-click on song, click properties, file tab, click Atrac OpenMG file and click Delete)

and just so you don't get confused your CD-R drive DOES NOT have to be titled 'E' for it to work. for example my drive is 'D' and my HiMD is recognized as 'E'

if you can play them on your PC (i.e. through SonicStage) than you can record from your PC main volume digitally and save them into WAVs using a variety of programs (even Microsoft Windows Sound Recorder if you wanted to)

right i guess I should have made that more clear (i did put it at the end ) only 2nd gen units can playback MP3s without having to convert them to Atrac first

i think a lot of people consider it to come down to this: if you want a recorder: buy a HiMD if you want a player and have a substanstial collection of MD gear that you aren't willing to give up: buy a HiMD if you want a player with ease of use (see: transfer, DRM) and don't mind playing a bit more: buy an iPod

LP2 is LP2, HiLP is of a lower quality than LP2

SonicStage saves a copy of the converted files so it can transfer them next time without having to reconvert them later. under your settings there is an option to erase the converted files after transfer

yes because the way WMA lossless is seen by SS is just as VBR WMA. Works on all test cases

and ATi for that matter

well there you go, don't even worry about it then

hopefully it works somewhat for them

this 'problem' has been around since HiMD has been introduced. I doubt if anyone knows why but here are some of my theories. It doesn't matter the amount of information the codec chooses to leave out (see: lossy compression) because all codecs take it from a PCM source no matter the source material (i.e. MP3 > PCM > Atrac or CD PCM > Atrac) The reasons I think it's slower are as follows: 1) The encoder is not as refined as the netMD encoders. netMD has been around for what 5 years now and has had significant time to refine their encoding techniques. 2) Because by definition Atrac3+ is a different codec than Atrac3 or MP3 it is unfair to judge them side by side. Atrac3+ uses a transform window much larger than Atrac3 (fancy way of saying it looks at more of the waveform at once) in order to better judge where the available bits should be allocated. This process of a larger view and estimation calculations are where I feel most of the computing power (and thus time) is placed. Because LP2 for example looks at much less of the wave form per cycle of the encoding process it is able to make its bit allocation quicker. Just my thoughts

awesome, good to hear hows the battery life on that thing?