marcintouch

Breepee2: Whoa, the Rio Carbon works like the Archos players, in that you can drag-and-drop the files onto a USB hard disk icon in your Mac, and it'll play them? My Rio Karma couldn't do that, which is why I got rid of it. Hmmm.

Thanks for your reply! Does that mean that SonicStage keeps track of both versions (MP3 and ATRAC), and you can choose between them? I'm not in front of my Windows machine right now to test it... Boy this device sounds good, though. And $11 CAN for 1 GB is absolutely worth it. To be able to have the entire 4-CD The Who Maximum R&B boxed set on one Hi-MD and STILL have 350 MB to spare is just wild. It also responds to the first play button of the day within 2-3 seconds, whereas the iPod mini takes an eternity to boot up. I'm not disappointed yet (except with SonicStage, of course). Thanks, M.E.

Hello campers... First of all, thanks to everyone on this forum for their invaluable experiences and advice. That being said, I'm going to exploit you all again. I've just received my MZRH10 (black + extra fingerprints), and while I think the hardware is just phenomenal (the sound quality is miles better than my iPod mini, using the same Sennheiser portable headphones), the software is a (pardon my Galactica) frackin' nightmare. I've given up on SonicStage being the manager for my 120+ GB music collection because while, after three or four attempts, it did import everything, working with those files is so slow as to render the program useless. While some MP3s transfer and play on the device perfectly, others do not, with no explanation. I'd be willing to convert those tracks to ATRAC3+ first, but I've discovered two problems with that: 1) Using the contextual menu to convert selected songs to ATRAC3+ seems to work, but then I can't find those converted songs and it leaves the old MP3s in the library; 2) I've installed the Sony MP3 Conversion Tool from this site, but it will not launch, telling me that I have to install SonicStage 2 or higher, and taking me to the Connect web site to download it. Obviously, I have SonicStage 3.1 (from the web) and MD Simple Burner (from the CD that came with my Hi-MD) installed and working, for a given value of "working." Does anyone have any suggestions to those two issues, or perhaps could someone simply write a Hi-MD plug-in for iTunes and put us all out of our misery? Thanks in advance, Marc E. - - - - My system: Sony Vaio, P4 3.2 GHz, Windows Media Centre Edition 2004 + SP2

Running VirtualPC 7 on a dual 2GHz G5 tower, SS3 downloaded and installed just fine on both my WinXPPro and Win2K "virtual" installations, and also ran on both, running substantially faster on Win2K, by the way. Plugging in a Sony MZ-N707 makes the device show up in VirtualPC's USB Devices list as a "NetMD Walkman," and you can select it as a USB device that you want VirtualPC to control, but nothing happens, and the next time you check your USB settings, that device is un-checked again. Opening SS3's options reveals no NetMD Walkman, and hovering the mouse over the big "Transfer" button at the top of the screen only gives you the option to burn CDs. Bugger. I didn't actually try to play any music, because I was too disappointed. :-) One question -- does anyone know what the purpose/utility of Sony's MP3 Converter software is? Doesn't SS usually take care of transcoding music as ATRAC? I'm curious... marcintouch

Well, just a quick note to let Mac users know... SonicStage 3 and whatever drivers it installs STILL do not work with VirtualPC on Mac OS X, either with XP Pro or Win2K. I suspect it isn't a Windows problem, but a VirtualPC problem, because while Virtual PC "sees" that a "Net MD Walkman" is attached via USB, it can't seem to route that device to VirtualPC. You can select it, but it doesn't stick. Oh, well. Back to the PC at home. marcintouch