Sparky191

Sewknee

Good auld Sony

Whats a Connects 2 adapter when its at home?

I would doubt it. It would expect a UMS device and the RH1 isn't one.

What analog element is there on MD that isn't on a CD for example. AFAIK they are both pure digital mediums.

http://www.goldmund.com/products/reference/ http://whathifi.com/hi-fi/archive/2007/06/...-turntable.aspx

Analog vs Digital http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_sound_vs._digital_sound

Seems to be some info about WMA9 being gapless with some software. http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=52272 http://www.thedowerhouse.com/jukebox/qanda.html Found some earlier topics on this http://forums.minidisc.org/index.php?showt...13688&st=15 http://forums.minidisc.org/index.php?showt...pid=88783 http://forums.minidisc.org/index.php?showtopic=14042 Knew there'd been discussions on this before. I'm sure a search would reveal more.

Hi guys I've a new idea for you to test. I've only been messing around so i need confirmation that this works. I ripped a CD to WMA 9 Lossless. Corrected the tags in MediaMonkey then dragged them from MediaMonkey Or Windows Explorer onto SS and it imported them fine. Kept the tags etc. (You have to select all tracks and make them compilations to group them in albums). SS would convert/re-encode from WM9L to ATRAC as it was transfered to HiMD. You might like to test the WAV=WMA9L and WAV>ATRAC is the same as WMA9L> ATRAC. Etc. Apologies if I'd made a mistake somewhere. So WMA9L might be useful as a Lossless library format for HiMD?

Tried this and the Wavs aren't named correctly in SS. I thought it might be clever about the folder/file names. But it isn't.

I was only comenting on the logic. AAL is flawed as its implemented now. Which is a pity. I thought iPods had gapless now?

If it were me I'd export them to WAV, chop out the ads in CDWAVE, then reimport them into SonicStage as seperate tracks and group them together. Editing sound likes on a large high res monitor is much more efficient than on a HiMD. Trancoding them isn't going to be much of an issue with talk shows.

IMO Theres no point in converting a low bitrate to a higher one. All you are doing is wasting space.

I don't see why you have to make it so complex. If you encode from a lower bitrate to a higher one its the same data, it can't add detail that isn't there. if you then convert it to lower birate again, you are telling the software to throw away more data and make it smaller. So changing the data for the worse. I'm guessing the difference between high and low quality, is very little in both quality and speed so anyone who can be bothered will default to high. If you have to spend a lot of effort to tell one birate from another, the difference isn't worth bothering about in the real world. At the end of the day its not the bitrates that are the problem here. Its SonicStage poor design, and programming bugs. So what should be simple is convoluted.

Whats the point of encoding something 64>256>64 ? How is it useful?

Maybe because HiCD isn't a real format? CD quality sound isn't superior to compressed ATRAC only to Lossy ATRAC. Lossless ATRAC is compressed but should be the same quality as a CD. Everyones buying DAPs, no ones buying CD portables. Thats why they won't make them. The market for hi quality audio is small and high quality audio can be achieved by a DAP if you know what you are doing, and its a lot more convenient and portable. (for most people). Head-Fi is full of these kinda people, using portable amps and iModded iPods etc. http://www.redwineaudio.com/Products.html There used to a lot of posts about CD portables there, but very few are using them now. Still some interest in the Vintage portables though. If you mean SACD then no they haven't released one. There are a few DVD-A players though. Dunno if they have a decent signal path though, most of them seem to be cheaper players and probably a half decent DAP would sound better. http://www.amazon.com/Panasonic-DVD-LA95-P...r/dp/B00005OP2T http://www.head-fi.org/forums/showthread.php?t=1240

No. The info is stored in the SS database. Theres no tag info/meta data in wavs. One big advantage of lossless like FLAC and similar. Tags.

What you are trying to do in AAL is already possible using other lossless formats. The Apple Lossless, FLAC, etc etc. Using iTunes or MediaMonkey (My fav) you can have a library in lossless and on synch with a portable device. Transfer and encode on the fly the lossless to a compressed bitrate as it transfers. (I'd love to see ATRAC and Sony Device support added to MediaMonkey.) With MM I was able to do with with iPods and Creative devices, and also filtree devices like my Samsung. You can do kinda of a manual version of the above though. The following is only my own method, I don't use lossless but it might give you some ideas. Its only from memory as I don't have SS installed on this machine. I only use SonicStage to transfer files to and from my HiMD. Convert to and from ATRAC. Etc. I don't use it to manage a library. I use MediaMonkey as it works well with tags and filetree and you can switch and correct tags from filetree and vice a versa. Its not perfect, but I like it. I find I get encoding errors using MediaMonkey so I don't use it to encode. Just to manage my library. I haven't heard/read anyone else having encoding problems with MM so YMMV. When I open my SS its empty. I have no library in it. So I drag a folder or files (using explorer) from my main library on drop them in the open window in SS. Mine are MP3's. (a compromise I'm happy with) You can do this with multiple albums and tracks. Then I select all tracks and make them a compilation. Seems to group them correctly even though most of them are not compilations. Then I transfer/convert the files and delete them from SS. You could do the same with FLAC. Convert them in MediaMonkey to the SS folder to WAVs. Import them or drop them on SS. Then transfer and encode them to HIMD on the fly. I think I tried this before, and because using MM I could name the folder and wav files as I wanted, (some applications are not as powerful as MM with file and folder renaming) SS imported the names/albums correctly. But it was a while ago so I could be wrong on the details. If you have the money and the equipment and time. Obviously theres no better SQ than everything in lossless. Anything else is compromised. No tagging with WAV though. Which is a big issue IMO. Playlists, grouping by genre, albums, year, chronological order. Stuff like that. Another disadvantage to using WAV and to some degree Lossless, is that every transfer takes a lot longer because you are moving and encoding vastly bigger files. One of the reasons I compromised on MP3 was to speed up the transfers and backups. I'm moving a lot less data and hardly ever converting/encoding data. That I don't want to speed a lot of money on big disks was another consideration. If I really want a lossless version I can just pull out the original CD which is my lossless archive of sorts. I burn all my recordings on to CD as an archive/backup. But at the end of day I accept its a compromise compared to a digital lossless library.

Lots of MP3 players have dynamic playlists. You can add tracks or see last played etc. The iTunes ones go a bit further in that you can script them and do all sort of things with them.

Because generally the bulk of the music is on the PC not the portable device. Playlists are a huge feature for Shuffle as is encoding to lower bit rates on the fly.

Well said. Lots of people dismiss this but is a very powerful feature. Its one of the things that would make me consider an iPod in the future. At the moment I'm happy to manage my music myself.

Its not a flaw with the codec. Just a mistake the programmer made when he was coding it. I'm surprised it got through testing and QA though. I'd say it would be easily fixed if you had the source code. Unfortunately they've taken to long to sort it out.

Kudos for doing the the test Storm I've been very interested in this for while but never had time to check it out. Have to say that I usually can hear the different between 256 and 64 especially in music I know well. For pop stuff it may not be a big deal, or obvious that quickly. But if its guitar stuff or classical where I know it very well I well notice it pretty quickly. Theres a kind of a swirl to the sound, almost like a Doppler effect. I don't use the best of gear either.

How did you confirm this by the way? Did you do a blind test between AAL > 64 kbps AAL > 256kbps > 64 kbps Its transcoded and from a lower quality file.

Is that not old news? I thought I'd heard of it a long time ago.