bug80

I like it, nice mix of different styles.

Downloading has just finished!

I only know the songs by Radiohead, Pinback and The Shins, but it sure looks like a good set of tracks

That could very well be the solution!

That is not one of the possible answers

My congratulations also, Volta!

Goodbye: My MZ-N510 as a portable player. Hello: iRiver IFP 899 flash player (1 GB) I had very long thoughts about what my next player would be, a Hi-MD unit, or a flash player. A HD unit was out of the question, because I want to be able to run/jog with the thing. I was very happy with my 510 for a long time, and everywhere I went I would show it to people, together with a story about how great the MD format is. And, let's face it, it is great. However, over time I became more and more tired with the restrictions I had to deal with regarding my player. I'm sort of an audiophile, and LP2 just isn't good enough for me. I used my player mainly for listening on the road to CD's that I've just bought, and I buy a lot of CD's. So, you can imagine it really became a hassle to do real-time recordings all the time, together with manually making track marks and titling and such. Not to mention I had to carry a lot of discs with me. 2nd generation Hi-MD units looked like the perfect solution for me. Not too expensive, 1 GB media and to possibility to play MP3 natively. I'm a fan of LAME and its presets, so I was very happy to hear that. Because I have a history with Sony, I decided to wait for a while to see if there were any hidden problems. And yes, I was right. It started with the stupid EQ restriction on EU models, which fortunately was hacked in no time. After that, I read stories about the crippled MP3 playback and I thought, "ok, that's it". For the time being, I will not give my money to a company that's dealing with its customers like this. I felt disdained. So, I made my decision and bought this nice iRiver player, with the following advantages: * No SonicStage, just drag & drop * Great sound (with a great quality EQ!) * Native MP3 playback (for real) * Linux (or any other platform) support * FM Radio * Recording via mic or line-in (which even can be used as a powered mic-in, I've heard) I haven't tried the recording features yet. I assume it's not as good as the MD units. Of course, I know Hi-MD can be great for people who make recordings. They just aren't players in the first place. However, I really think Sony is missing an opportunity here. If they just.., aaah never mind. Sorry for this rant. It's just my opinion. I will keep my 510, so I can use it to transfer band recordings over to my PC for burning to CD. Analogue transfer, that is.

I'm going to keep this link. Great article, sums up the biggest lies quite well. Too bad the author doesn't mention audio compression. "MP3 is bad" or something like that should definitely be in the top ten. Just a note: The "Vacuum-tube lie" only holds for high-end audio. As a guitarist, I can say vacuum tubes are very nice in the field where overdrive is needed (instead of transparancy). It is very hard to model by digital techniques, because of its non-linear response. However, I have to do some blind testing yet

Note that if you want to play your audio back on a 2nd generation Hi-MD unit, the MP3 files will sound dull compared to ATRAC. So, if you think frequency response is important go for ATRAC!

Is this a new Apple device?

Yes, true. I believe a lot of programs get this wrong, probably because a lot of programmers are too lazy to put "unsigned" in front of their declarations (I "forget" it quite often too).

It's a shame SonicStage does not read this extra header fields by the way. 10 minutes extra work for the programmer and you will make a lot of recordists happy

He wants to convert the WAV files to Hi-LP (which unfortunately is only possible through SonicStage), so converting to MP3 first will not be a good idea.

It probably has to do with the fact that standard PCM wave files have an official limit size of 2 Gb. 206 minutes * 10.09 Mb/min / 1024 = 2.03 Gb. By adding some extra info in the header, larger wave files can be made, but SonicStage does probably not read this extra fields.

FLAC is probably more popular because it is more popular It is a circle. Furthermore, unlike Monkey's Audio a lot of effort is put into more hardware support for FLAC. Also decoding is more CPU friendly (that may also explain the hardware support). Finally, FLAC supports multichannel audio. For a more or less complete comparison see here: wiki EDIT: Forgot to mention FLAC supports ReplayGain, APE does not.

My favorites: Jeff Buckley - Live in Chicago R.E.M. - Perfect square U2 - Live in Boston

For me, the most important factor is higher bitrates, it is very unlikely I will ever pay for music encoded in LP2. The quality should be at least comparable with LAME standard/extreme preset, or OGG Vorbis q5/q6 (so, I guess Sony's equivalent is Hi-SP). Lossless is even better, of course. Furthermore, I like the preview (or actually pre-listen) feature of iTunes better than the one of Connect: the sound quality is much higher and you see on screen how much time is left while loading the sample. With Connect, you just have to wait for the sample to play without getting any information. Finally a compliment: I think the lay-out is good, less "busy" than iTunes. In my opinion they should use less gray, however.

Eh, yeah sorry I was sleeping I guess But hey, the external mixer part was new!

Exactly, that's why I was a little cautious with my statements. I should do an ABX test someday, comparing the audio from a DVD with its CD equivalent.

I assume you mean "normal" DVD's, not DVD-audio? The audio on a typical DVD is sampled at 48 kHz instead of 44.1 kHz (CD), which may add more clarity. At least I personally think I notice a difference and I like the sound of DVD better. It may also be 24 bit instead of 16 bit, but I'm not sure. Ironically, audio on a DVD (movie/concert) is compressed most of the times (PCM tracks are rare), mostly at a 192 kbs bitrate.

I should turn the volume of your player up to the max, like greenmachine suggested. You can also look for a device that you can use as a pre-amp, for instance a mixer, before your send the signal into your soundcard (watch out for clipping, though). The best solution would be digital, you can look if you can borrow a deck from someone with digital out (or search on eBay). If you do a digital to digital copy, no extra noise will be introduced. If you can't get rid of the noise using the methods above, you can use the noise reduction feature of CoolEdit (or another audio editor) to remove most of it. You have to do this carefull though, because it will alter your "clean" signal also. If you use this, I'd suggest you make a backup of the original recording (edit: I mean the recording + noise) first.

Do you mean there are extra´s on the DVD? Cause I saw the movie in the cinema already. The Rock was very funny indeed. Back on topic: I just saw Hero (the DVD came earlier than expected) and I think it´s a briljant movie. Nice story and visually stunning!

What soundcard do you use for the recording and what are your settings concerning sampling frequency and bit-depth? Maybe there´s something wrong there.

I have to see Hero yet (I will get it in a couple of weeks with a magazine I'm subscribed to, so I just have to wait...). Asian movies are in general a lot slower than Hollywood ones, it's a matter of taste I guess. Did you like it? I think it's funny, but not as good as Get Shorty.

I just saw Garden State too. Briljant movie! Funny and touching in very subtle ways.. Really great!