Justin42

I have the NH1, the "If You Can Afford It You Can Afford Our Cables Too (not that we'll make it easy to find them!)" model of the HiMD family. (stupid Sony...) Anyway, you should never lose more space. You'll just never see a true 1gb, it should always be just about that 963mb mark.

Are you SURE the blank disc originally reported 1GB? I don't have my USB cable with me (stupid proprietary Sony cables) to test but I am pretty sure my NH1 reports about 963mb or so with a brand new, fresh from the shrinkwrap, blank MD, due to everything above. (TOC overhead, the 1000byte math, etc)

If Sony introduced a new HiMD format ALREADY, especially an entirely incompatible one, I think they'd piss a lot of people off who already bought into HiMD. While more storage is always good, basically throwing away current HiMD (or having 2 incompatible HiMD standards out at once) would probably be the death of the format (due to concern over whether or not anything would EVER stay compatible).. unless they got EVERYTHING else right -- native MP3, no DRM, etc. Of course, this may be entirely untrue, or it may not be quite the way it is being presented here. And given Sony's apparent lack of care/understanding/desire about HiMD, it's quite likely they WILL ditch the early adopters.

D'OH! It's too late for me to be reading the forums. Didn't realise you had WAV files (I read "WAV" and thought "Oh, CDs..."). If you have a program like Nero that has a DriveImage tool, you can burn the WAVs to a virtual CD, then rip those using SimpleBurner. Otherwise, I think you may have to burn to a real CD and then use SimpleBurner. Sorry for not reading your post correctly .. but the following still kind of applies: Look for the to the upgraded SimpleBurner in the "Simple Burner 2 hosted at minidisc.org" topic -- SimpleBurner. It's pinned at the top of this forum... (at least I hope that's the right link; the message is fairly old but I thought the only version available was the latest, so hopefully the "latest" is what you get. If not, dig around the forums for talk of SimpleBurner as that's the easy answer to your problem) And you should probably upgrade to SonicStage 2.3. It won't fix your specific problem but will probably help the whole MD experience be at least a little better.

Is there any way to record LP2 onto normal MD, and then somehow transfer that file to a HiMD disc without re-encoding? I have an MD deck (with MDLP support) and a lot of stuff I'd like in LP2 on a HiMD disc for travelling, etc, and would like to not have to use SS to do the encoding due to the lower quality, but it seems like there's not really an option... From my VERY limited testing, LP2 via SS does sound a bit more "compressed" than LP2 from the deck, which tends to be very, very good for its bitrate.

Not really. As long as you can burn whatever music you buy to CD, you can use Simpleburner to then take that CD and put it onto a MD.

Wow, even with the exchange rate you could clean up on that! Buy as many as possible at those prices and put em on Ebay! (preferably ebay.com -- 5 HiMD discs for $13US + shipping???

Not too many people are going to have a lot of experience with different HiMD units, they're just too new. The minidisc.org site is about as good as you'll get, if you find the HiMD equipment link there's a nice area with "commonalities" and "differences from base model"... I think it's right off the home page.

Is there a way to point SB/SonicStage to a local server?? Better yet, is there a way to make it recognize CD-TEXT? :/

No, because it's reading the error correction code to see if there IS an error. It needs both to detect (and correct) an error. The correction code works with the data, it's not just the data a second time. It's basically a checksum, like "if the total of the read data is THIS, then everything's OK." Bad data can cause a player to panic... this is at a physical bit layer, not even the audio layer. Some players just ignore the error data and sends it on through, others may flag a read error and keep trying to re-read (and can NEVER read it "properly" as the bad error data says it's bad every time)... Another way they work (I think this is more common now) is to put bad data in the discs's table of contents in such a way that PC readers freak out but music CD players somehow ignore it... There are 2-3 major ways of doing it... there is a pretty good, but somewhat outdated, article at http://www.cdrfaq.org/faq02.html#S2-4 Basically, how your drive/player handles protected CDs depends on how your CD player/drive reads the data, how picky it wants to be, how it handles errors, and the condition of the disc. A lot of times, in either cheap or high end (strangely) hardware, they try to read the disc the same way a computer rips audio-- bit for bit. Cheap units do it because it's simple to build the hardware (very PC-controller like) but then output using cheap hardware; expensive units do it for bit-accuracy and then output via expensive hardware. But the problem is much of the copy protection works by making the disc hard to get a bit-for-bit copy of due to the bogus information in the disc, so players that work like this are the ones that freak out first.

The 1 year parts/90 day labour is unfortunately becoming pretty common in the US. I normally hate extended warranties but I definitely picked one up for my NH1!

Not necessarily true, many of the copy "protection" technologies actually write errors into the disc that most CD players *should* ignore, but don't always. You can't blame them, the players are just doing their job-- they see a read error, they try to correct it, but the error correction code is "poisoned" so that it's totally bogus, which confuses the CD player. As such, they are technically not "compact discs" in the trademarked sense of the word. They are physically tampering with the Red Book CD standard. Philips (as the owner of the CD technology) has made rumblings in the past about suing companies who use this sort of protection (as breaking the licensing terms), wish they actually would do it and not just threaten. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/01/18/ph..._to_put_poison/ I've actually heard the problem affects as many ultra high end audiophile CD players as low end ones...

Thanks! Those look so cool. From the first link (translated via Google), "However, the USB terminal does not have, there is no cooperation function of the PC." So I bet that's where the confusion comes in. It can't hook up to a PC, so there's no way to record LP2/LP4 on HiMD (stupid!! stupid!! ). (Can anyone tell that's one of my MAJOR pet peeves of HiMD? LP4 I can understand as we already have a 64kbps codec, but LP2 is really a perfect compromise for most non-critical listening)

Can you provide working links? My guess is (given how poor automatic translation usually is between Japanese and English) they mean that LP2/4 cannot be recorded on a HiMD disc, which is consistent with the (bizarre!! frustrating!!) behaviour of the Sony units. You can export LP2/LP4 from a PC, but you can't record it just using the unit itself.

You unfortunately (at least in my limited experiences trying this exact thing) won't be able to play back through the USB port-- you can only do that on HiMD formatted discs. I don't think there is any way you can digitally transfer music OFF of a NetMD (normal MD) formatted disc. The best you can do is record using the Line In on your computer which may or may not sound too great. An alternative, if you can swing it somehow, is to use a minidisc deck with optical out, plug it into an optical in on a HiMD unit, and record the old MD to a new HiMD disc in PCM mode. Then you can go into Soundstage and play the file and record it using TotalRecorder (Awesome little program! ). Hopefully I'm wrong and there's an easier way (As I'd love to get stuff I recorded on normal MDs off digitally using my HiMD unit)...

That's good... I was a bit worried about what they were drinking at Sony to be thinking 64kbps ATRAC = 192kbps MP3... ATRAC3+ at 64kbps sounds VERY VERY good *for a 64kbps codec* but nowhere near like a 192kbps MP3...

The only way to know is to just try it out and see what sounds good to your ears. HiLP is a 64kbps format, LP2 is 132kbps. Unfortunately (why, Sony, why???) you can't use SimpleBurner to put LP2 files on a HiMD disc. Which is totally ridiculous, as it'd be perfect. You have to rip/convert your files to LP2 using SonicStage and then push them over. I've found 64kbps HiLP is really not thaaaaaat bad for non-discriminating uses, such as car use, or at work where I don't have the greatest speakers. I was quite surprised by the quality overall. It'll let you fit at least 30-40 CDs on one HiMD disc. You can definitely hear distortion/artifacts but it's nowhere near as bad as MP3 at 64kbps. I wouldn't even try 48kbps. (Why does Sony give us 2 VERY low bitrate options but then only 1 above that??). HiSP is 256kbps and sounds pretty good overall. You'd get less than 16 average length albums on a HiMD disc, though.

Sounds like you inititally recorded with the transfer mode in HiLP and then the second time it switched to HiSP. Check the little box in the middle of the SimpleBurner window, depending on your version you can get PCM/HiSP/HiLP/48kbps. (you may or may not see some of them). HiSP will get about 10-12 albums per HiMD disc, HiLP will get closer to 40.

Huh? It'll take basically the same amount of space if you record it via SimpleBurner or optically... (it might be a tiny bit different but nothing major) just set the mode on the unit to HiLP or HiSP before you record. But you're right, draconian copy protection that keeps CDs from even properly PLAYING only hurts the labels and the industry. You could try getting a new CD drive, some are better at handling copy protection than others (Which I assume this is)... I have some LiteOn and Plextor CDRW units that can pretty much read anything.

Looks vaguely Sony-esque to me. Not that I'm too familiar with Onkyo's Japanese designs, but the first thing I thought is it looks like an evolution of the Sony decks. I would buy a deck in a heartbeat if I could get one with digital out. Without digital out (and in, obviously! it gets a little less tempting. But I can see Sony being the stumbling block... they've apparently not taken their MP3 "lessons" quite as well as they claimed.

I'm not sure where it saves the files (check C:\Documents and Settings\[your username]\Local Settings\Temp for "ssupg" files or the like) but possibly it didn't really re-download the files the times you re-ran it after the initial error-- it saw you had the proper files (by name) and skipped the download, then failed running the original corrupt downloads. Try emptying out your temp folders, restart your computer, and see if it works.

It depends on your camera. In mine, if I change the memory card, the sequence for the day resets. Granted, it's a cheap camera, but it's an issue if I am out taking pictures, have to switch cards, and start over again. If I were on vacation, I'd want the memory card reader as a sort of "backup" (in case anything happened to the camera while being out and about), as well as possibly being able to erase pictures if I were to [gasp horror!] run out of space, so I was concerned about how trustworthy of copy the card reader makes. (since you have no way to verify the pictures are really there since you can't see the directories or anything)

Thank you very much for the information! It definitely looks like something I need to get before my next vacation (Well, that assumes I HAVE a "next vacation" )... Does it support xD cards natively? Or does it need an adapter? (I only ask as I've seen some conflicting details)

Totally agree there! The NH1 has awesome battery life but it's annoying having to cart the charging stand around. A not-so-nice, but almost as useful (for me) thing would be to have an adapter to plug in some sort of AC power directly to the unit without the stand. But a AA battery back would be ideal. (so would a non-proprietary USB cable adapter that was cheaper than the $25+ish cable it has now)

I thought Audible was some form of AAC (like what iTunes/iPod uses)..?