kiryen

Yeah... Nothing about MDs is particularly cheap. Hi-MD media runs to about 13 dollars CAD, I got the NH-1 for $500 dollars. When you calculate capacity to price, the MD isn't going to be winning any contests against HDD players. As for peta, there's so much hello kitty where I live that small animals don't mean anything to me if they have mouths.

...I'm a little bit less optimistic about the future of MD in Japan. Looking at the numbers, it looks like a lot of people already own MD units, but not that many are willing to pursue the technology any further. It'll probably be another couple of years before I'll consider another MD unit myself. Sony really dropped the ball with Hi-MD, no MP3 support with the first-gen units, and no true playlist support, even though that's how you organize your library in SonicStage. Unless Sony manages to make Connect player more usable than SonicStage, the MD has no hope of winning against HDD/Flash-based players. A lot of people have large music libraries, myself included. I recently got an iPod nano and started using iTunes, and I don't think I could ever go back to SonicStage. (Not that SonicStage is without its merits, for one thing, it allows you to assign artists wtih Kanji/Kana names a letter of the alphabet so that those artists are not all clumped together at the bottom of your library, as they are in iTunes.) As for the inherent faults of the format: With MD, when you want to add new tracks to a disc, you need to delete an equal amount of old tracks. You end up doing a lot more maintenance work than you would with higher-capacity HDD/Flash players. The slow transfer time makes me want to hurt small animals. 1Mb/s sounds like a decently fast time, considering you only need 15 minutes to fill up a Hi-MD, but then you actually sit around waiting those 15 minutes and it seems like an eternity. If a good HDD/Flash recorder ever comes out, it'll be the end of Hi-MD, since it's pretty much the only advantage that the format can claim.

yeah, you'll still need to edit the registry (don't have a net md, so i didn't use the second part of the hacks, i only used the region change.) text will show up fine on sonicstage, but won't appear correctly when transferred to hi-md unless the region in the registry has been changed to 40000 hexdecimal.

sorry for the wait, it's taken me a little longer to do the reformat than i thought (creating an install cd with all the hotfixes slipstreamed and tweaked just the way i liked it took a long, long time, and in a room with no a/c, not very pleasant) anyhow, i'll be installing sonicstage tonight (seeing as how the latest attempt to get some form of a/c working has failed) and i'll let you know how it goes.

alright, thanks, i'll try that out... (reformatting my system right now)

I downloaded SonicStage 3.2 a couple of days ago (English version). And I decided to just run it with AppLocale and see what happens. The kanji and kana in titles show up fine. So would I still need to edit the registry?

i heard one of the additions would be support for atrac3+ on memory stick pro duos (which'd be good new for psp owners)

i doubt it's a problem with the nh1, since that's what i use and i've used the over the ear b&o headphones, the ex71, the ex51, the v700dj, and the bose quietcomfort 2, with it and i have to say, the ex 71 and the ex 51 are the quietest by far, requiring a higher volume setting than even the v700dj. (i usually don't go above 20 on the v700dj, but i can go up to 25 and beyond with the ex51 without feeling like i'm destroying my ears.)

Hmm... I think I'll type up the instructions for getting the JP version of SS to work on an English machine again, since I forgot some things last time I typed them up. Before you start... N.B. The Kanji support in SonicStage is limited to those characters which are present in Japanese, hence, not all Chinese characters will be supported. There's also a possibility that if you have song data in Chinese encoding, that they will not translate properly into SS, since it is based on Japanese encoding. There's a chance that despite following all the steps below, you still won't get your song data to display correctly. So that's that. If that doesn't faze you... Make sure you have the following: Working knowledge of kana/kanji/Chinese (so you know what you're doing, and how to use SS once you install it) WinRAR (or compression software of some sort which allows you to extract setup files) Support for Asian languages in WinXP installed (check in Control Panel>Regional Settings) 1. Download AppLocale from Microsoft and install it (link here). (And WinRAR as well if you don't have it.) 2. Download SS from mora.jp, or the link here. (this includes the mora store, but you can just ignore it) 3. Extract the contents of the SS Installer file to a folder. (Right-click the file and you should have an option which says something to the effect of "Extract to SonicStageInstaller\" 4. Change the following line in SetupSS.ini: from - supportoslang = Japanese to - supportoslang = English 5. Run AppLocale, choose Launch an application, browse to the folder where you extracted the SS Installer file and select SetupSS.exe. 6. Set the language of the application to Japanese (日本語). 7. Click through all of the menus and it should install correctly. 8. Run AppLocale again, and this time select Omgjbox.exe in the install folder (default: C:\Program Files\Sony\SonicStage\), this time, create a shortcut so that you don't have to fire up AppLocale everytime you want to use SS. 9. Import your files and cross your fingers, if everything works, then you'll have your Chinese/Kanji song data, if not... then you'll likely have to enter everything again using the Japanese IME (or you can try copying and pasting). That's that. For a more verbose set of instructions, check my message history, I only have a couple, and my first post is the one you're looking for.

Can you see if you're able to use ATRAC3 or ATRAC3+ with an MS Pro Duo card if you have one? According to the manual and what I've gathered from other boards, MS Pro Duo won't work with ATRAC, but the MS Duo will. Apparently it's because MS Pro Duo doesn't actually support MagicGate, which is needed for ATRAC3 and any other file format which has copy restrictions. (Which is also why the new Walkman phone will also not support ATRAC3/+, I'm guessing, since that comes with a 512mb MS Pro Duo card.) That's a shame since Duo cards only go up to... 64mb? Oh, here's a link to the Sony Ericsson W800 Walkman Phone on Engadget. Thanks.

I'm using the Japanese version of SS right now for this reason. It should be able to recognize Japanese song data, at least it works for my WMA files. For more information on the Japanese version, I made another post about it with installation instructions in the HiMD board. Note: You'll need WinRAR (or another file decompression utility) to extract the installer files for step 3. Hope that helps.

Went to talk to my local Sony Store sales reps (Eaton Centre, Toronto, ON, Canada), they said that it'd be 25CDN for them to update the firmware to play MP3s. He did mention that there were plans for them to release the firmware online so that users could just download it and flash the ROM via USB, but I'm assuming that Sony doesn't want to risk people screwing it up and sending it in for repairs. (And this way they get some $$$ too, which should help them recoup the money they're losing on the PSP right now.) EDIT: I told him I had a NH1, but it should apply to all first gen units. OR maybe he confused the HiMD upgrade with the HD player upgrade, but I don't think so. He was talking specifically about the HiMD, and I think he knew his stuff.

Are you using the JP or EN version of SonicStage? I haven't had any success to get japanese to display correctly in EN SonicStage (though I haven't tried transferring the files to see whether or not they end up correctly on the unit) Also, SonicStage and NH1 only support kanji, not all chinese characters. Furthermore, you have to enter the kanji in japanese IME, not chinese. any of those three things might be the problem. as a general recommendation, i suggest you 1. Download the JP version of SS, here. it's comes with mora, the JP version of Sony's connect service, but you can just set it to open up to my library if you don't use it. (I can't find the official one, and seeing as how sony doesn't appear to make it readily available, I'm not going to bother.) 2. Once you've done that, you can either change your regional setting to Japanese and leave it that way or you can download microsoft's applocale (link here.) 3. If you're not running a JP version of windows (not just the regional setting, but where you purchased it), you'll need to perform the following steps: a. Right-click the SS Installer file, you should see an option which says something to the effect of "Extract to SonicStageInstaller\". Do it. b. Open the file SetupSS.ini in the folder, double clicking should work, otherwise, right-click it and select "Edit". c. Look for a line which starts "supportoslang..." it should be the 12th line down. Delete "Japanese" and replace it with "English". d. Save your changes and close the file. 4. If you changed your regional setting, just run the SSInstaller file. If not, run Applocale and point it to either the SonicStageInstaller.exe file (or, if you performed step 3, SonicStageInstaller\SetupSS.exe). Select Japanese(日本語) as the language and just click through the various menus. 5. Once SS is installed, you might want to consider making a shortcut to SS. Open Applocale, and browse to the omgjbox.exe file (generally "C:\Program Files\Sony\SonicStage\Omgjbox.exe"). Click through the screens until you get to Create a shortcut to always run thsi application. Check the box and the shortcut will be created. You'll be bugged about AppLocale everytime you open up SS, but it's the only way for it to work that I've found, for some reason, SonicStage didn't like it when I changed my regional settings for the install and actually running SS (Only partial Japanese text support, some text shows up as "??????".) Hope that helps. Edit: Further note about AppLocale, though I don't have any other programs which require a different codepage than English, you could use it for just about any program which turns up as gibberish in Windows.