Azureal

toxaco, that's a cool technique, I have many DJ mixes which are very long as well. I think I'll give your method a try. I typically just let Sonic Stage convert to ATRAC directly from MP3 and the results are not too bad at all. Most of the mixes I download vary in encoding methods from 160K VBR to 320K VBR, some are CBR. Sonic Stage does a surprisingly good job of transcoding such a variety of file types. I'll need to find an old copy of Nero which I have stashed away somewhere and run it in the Virtual XP as I don't think any one has had any luck getting Simple Burner to function properly in W7 64bit. I could be wrong about that ...

My initial experience with LP4 came via Simple Burner application encoding on the PC then transferred directly to an MZ-N1. I recall that it had artifacts and I preferred the sound quality of LP2. For me LP4 could be used for background listening at low volume levels, but not likely with my headphone amp and Senns or Grados. I may give real-time LP4 encoding with my MXD-D400 a try and then playback on a HiMD portable with Type-S. Maybe even a comparison of that with encoding on the PC and transfer to said player.

That's very cool Jimma, thanks for sharing! I remember when Rolling Stone released a similar edition with an attached MD. I don't recall that there was a contest to win a new MZ-1 but the disk was filled with music, sadly I lost it somewhere along the way ...

The second picture you posted is the one I recall which charged the LIP-4MW Lithium Ion batteries, I thought it held two batteries, but it looks pretty much as I remember.

I recall seeing some unusual looking external LIP4-MW charger in the past few years, it did host two batteries at one time. It looked very cheaply made and fragile, it was not made with the same quality of the Sony chargers for the NiMH batteries. I saw them on eBay a few years ago.

That's not too bad a price on that unit either, I'll have to give it some thought. Since the original head unit is designed by Alpine, I would not expect anything to be plug and play (more like the old days of Windows 95, we called it plug and pray!). I am sure the control signals would be completely different. I know we had this conversation before, a couple of years ago. I'll try to find it. I am out of town right now, but when I get home, I am going to call the dealership and see if they can get one of the original units for me. If not, I will look very seriously at this option again. Thanks Stephen.

Once again, exomoons, nice find! It looks like everything arrived in great shape.

I wish I had the forethought to make a similar choice bluecrab! I bought my car new in 1999 about two years before my first MD portable. It is a BMW 328i and has one of those molded type dashes where the radio is all integrated. As it turns out, BMW made a radio for my model car which is an MD player but it was a $600 dollar option and is now very difficult to find in the states, like nearly impossible. I have found several suppliers in the UK (with the assistance of Hudson and sfbp) but they will not ship to the US. I'll get one eventually, that is my hope at least! Another option, which Stephen and I have discussed a couple of times is to rig up one of the Sony changers to work with my current stock CD head unit as the wiring is all in place in the car to plug in the changer in the trunk and the head unit is designed to control a changer. Thank goodness my commute is only 15 minutes. :-)

To add to Stephen's list of potential HiMD units you can include the MZ-EH50, it is a player only like the EH70, I have one and it plays all formats perfectly, a great ''beater" unit to keep my RH1 safe in the house. :-) It seems like even the units listed here are becoming more difficult to find at a reasonable price. Some folks are listing units on eBay for crazy prices and the sad thing is they are not selling, then they continue to list them again hoping to score big, I think they end up sitting on a shelf and no one wins that way. As Stephen mentions, just keep vigilant and watch eBay daily to spot the deals. I would love to have folks share links to their ebay.com saved searches for portable MD players. I had a couple of really great saved searches and then changes ebay accounts and lost them.

Those are arguably the two finest portables Sony produced from each era, the N10 a full magnesium body with Type-S DSP with MDLP/NetMD and a sweet sounding analog amp, and the RH1 which many of us believe to be one of the sweetest Sony machines made. I love the car changer as well, I wish I could have MD in my car ... :-( Thanks again for sharing more great pics! I agree Irman-UK, the Chum discs do look cool. I think I have seen a few of them on eBay in the past. I also prefer the 80 minute disks, my stash has probably 25% 74 minute blanks which is OK, better than 60 minutes! :-)

Yes, that sounds like a pretty good value to me! You should be set for a while. I have a stash as well, I don't think it is as large as yours though :-). I think I'll get everything out and post a picture of mine soon, just for fun ...

That looks like a really nice stash! Do you mind me asking what you paid for the lot? It looks to be a great assortment of nice MDs. Welcome back to the wonderful world and sound of MD!

Just from my experience, I am pretty sure there is never any copy of music data from the HD1/HD5 back to the PC, it just happens too quickly. When transferring, say, 5 GB of ATRAC data from the PC to the device it may take 5 - 10 minutes. On the other hand, when returning authentications back to the PC, as you said, it checks the keys, changes the counts and deletes the files from the portable device, this is a very short process taking only seconds. If the OP does not mind converting to MP3 (or even WAV as it looks like HiMDRenderer supports that as well) he can certainly use that and not be concerned with the encryption. I may be wrong, I hope I am not, it would be a shame if the device had to be authenticated to the PC in use before even HiMDRenderer could transfer and convert the files. That may be where you suggest the VLC/ffmpeg project could come into play.

Check out thread if you have time. Also, I am having issues with the downloads section here, but the original author is still hosting the app here: http://www.marcnetsystem.co.uk/HIMDRenderer-1.00-beta4.zip

There is an app called HiMDRenderer in the downloads section which can read the OMA files from the HD1, HD3 and HD5 or from HiMD units (and device which shows as a USB Mass Storage in Windows). Any way, the app will read the files and convert them to MP3 at whatever bit rate you choose. SonicStage never really does anything except transfer files from the PC to the device, no transfer the other way ever occurs. In otherwords, even if you could authorize the device you would never be able to transfer files from the HD3 back to the PC. Check out HiMDRenderer, it takes a long time to process an entire HD3 drive of music but after a few hours you'll have nice sounding MP3 versions of the files. I think you need to have SonicStage installed and also Lame encoder, it may come with the Lame dll, but it needs SonicStage to get the public key for the decryption of the OMA data files.

Stephen, I tried to convert a few files to 128Kbps ATRAC3plus and transfer them to my HD5 and I can't seem to get them to transfer. I also remember a conversation a while back where you and Arvin were discussing some tweaks to SS Connect player to get it to transfer different bit rates. Isn't ATRAC3plus all done in software on a DSP in a HiMD player? If so, it may be possible that units were never programmed to process 128Kbps. 192 seems like the only rate between 64 and 256 which I can transfer. I wonder if one of the newer flash devices such as the ones you mention can handle the middle bit rate ATRAC3plus files.

I am able to encode at this rate in SonicStage, I just recall that I could never get the files to transfer onto an MD formatted as HiMD. I can try it again to see if I have any luck. At the time I last tried I think I decided it was not possible.

Another sweet find PhilippeC!

Nice looking unit, I love the fact that the cassette can be disconnected and removed, cassette is useless to me. I just noticed that the shipping is more than the unit itself!

I have never been able to copy ATRAC3+ 128 onto a HiMD formatted MD. It's too bad because it would afford the best sound to space usage on an 80 minute MD.

I think what sfbp means is that the battery replacement is not the easiest task to perform. As I mentioned, I have done it and it is pretty involved, a lot of small screws and springs, other parts, it is a challenge but if you can use a couple of small screwdrivers and and tweezers or needle nose pliers, you should be fine.

The NH1 definitely needs that multi-line remote to access all of its features and settings. I have seen them on eBay but they are not too common to find alone. I am sure you could order one directly from Sony. There are also several other remotes from other units which will control the device and display track data but not give full functionality.

I replaced mine about two or three years ago and I think I paid around 25 USD for the battery. It was a bear to replace too, there are small springs and you have to be very careful to make note of where they belong ... My unit still takes a good charge and las time I checked it ran all day without a problem.

I suggest heading over to: http://forum.notebookreview.com/sony/ there is a really active community there for all notebook manufacturers. You can post the same question there and will undoubtedly find others with the same machine to chat with.

Are you running W7 for any reason other than SonicStage? If you have no other reason to run W7, perhaps consider running Windows XP as a VM in Parallels. I suspect the issue is related to running the 64bit OS W7 in Parallels inside 64bit OSX. There are some challenging translations taking place to make that physical USB port on the Mac look like a physical USB port on the W7 VM, I just wonder if the implementation of the vitual port on th eW7 install is not quite right and the NETMD760 driver is choking on it. I am full on Windows now and was for many years before running OSX on a MacBook Pro for two years. I ran VMWare Fusion with Windows XP to run SonicStage and never had any problems. I was not however running the NETMD760 driver for the 64bit OS. Do you have a copy of XP which you can install in a new VM to test with?