littlefox

I tried reseating the memory, but it didn't work either. Anyway, a miracle: I managed to get it to work by fiddling with the permissions for Omgjbox.exe and items.dll. I switched on the permissions to allow users to modify and write to the two files. Others may wish to try this.

I tried 4.3 first. I tried the earlier versions to see if the problem was specific to 4.3, which it wasn't.

Tried that by switching to classic Windows. Didn't help.

I've been trying versions of SonicStage from 4.0 all the way to 4.3 on my Vista Home Premium system and it's consistently crashing at the same spot every time during startup; it loads fine until it reaches the "Loading UI components" bit and then crashes and dies, leaving my with a cryptic Windows error message box as follows: Any help at all will be most welcome.

Damn, just looking at it makes me feel like falling in love again. And here's me in Malaysia where Sony's decided not to bring in MD anymore. I don't see the lack of an AA adaptor to be that much of a problem. I'm sure someone can whip up a solution if they so wish. My main concern would be how reliable the unit is, so I'll probably be waiting until enough people play with it for long enough to get an idea of what sorts of issues I may have to contend with. My NH900 still works like a charm, after all.

It all started when my little brother's cassette tape Walkman started to chew up tapes. For a hobby band that enjoys recording how they play just to be able to laugh at how sucky they sound, this was an unacceptable state of affairs. This was when I started looking around for a new recorder. I'd known for a while that some MP3 flash players could actually record, so I first looked at that. A combination of lousy test recordings from built-in mics, dearth of line-in equipped players, memory space and cost of SD cards dissuaded me from buying them at first, but it was something that was pretty much needed. Then I learnt from an anime, BECK: Mongolian Chop Squad, that you could actually record stuff onto Minidiscs. It was a surprise; my only memory of Minidiscs were a couple of pre-recorded discs spotted in stores that made me scratch my head as to what the hell they were back in 2001. I decided to do some research first, which is how I stumbled upon this site. A lot of the Minidisc vs MP3 web pages and discussion faqs were basically fanboy jobbies where the opposing format was usually attributed, among others, everything from poor recording/playback quality right down to blame for the depletion of the ozone layer. So I posted questions here and a couple other objective forums to see what would best suit my needs according to them. In the end, Minidisc won hands down. Better cost per media and better recording sound quality pushed me in favour of HiMD, and I went and bought my MZ-NH900.

Ah... I remember being in more or less the same situation almost a year ago. As has been said, if you need to do good quality recording, go for Minidisc, preferably Hi-MD for capacity and USB upload ability with the latest SonicStage for looser DRM. If all you're after is music playback, go with a HDD MP3 player. Another reason to pick Minidisc over an MP3 player is capacity. Minidisc players have practically limitless capacity in 700MB or 1GB portions while your basic flash memory MP3 player is limited to whatever internal memory it has. With HDD MP3 players, you've got a helluva lot of space but, again, you're limited to the capacity of the HDD itself. In both cases, once you hit the limit, you'll need to delete it off of the player to store new MP3s while all you have to do with Minidisc players is just buy some more discs. Some flash memory MP3 players have the ability to take in SD cards for expandable capacity, but SD cards are still mad expensive compared to Minidiscs, so you can't just afford to buy a new card just like that, not unless you're loaded. One downside to Minidisc right now: Sony's support for it is dropping after the market-based restructuring it did sometime late last year. Depending on where you are, it might be hard to get the discs themselves and impossible to get new players. I should also note that there are consumer MP3 players out there that do have line-ins intended to plug into a CD player for encoding to MP3 on the fly. You can probably stick in a microphone into these (assuming you have an adapter to get it down to the right jack size) but I don't know how good the encoding will be.

Well, I happen to be considering these too. My intended purposes for wireless headphones would be monitoring the recording levels while recording my jam sessions as well as normal-use headphones (assuming the base station is small and portable enough (ie. runs on battery power as well as external power).

My personal worry is that I wouldn't be able to replace my NH900 if and when it craps out on me (and it will; every device with moving parts does). It's unlikely that MD units will become completely unavailable, considering that Sony's home market of Japan still has a pretty substantial amount of support for the format (so I heard), but there's always the outside chance that they will do it anyway. I'm not a professional audio recorder, so it doesn't make much sense to me to buy a professional unit at absurd 'professional' prices. Maybe I should stockpile a unit or two.

Update from Malaysia: MD is axed in Malaysia because of lack of market, according to a Sony Style store employee. No recoders or players will be made available anymore, but media will still be available for as long as it's being manufactured. I got the impression that other markets where MD is more popular will still carry models, but since the fellow is just a sales-level store employee I'd take that with a grain of salt. Still, it seems that it's not completely over for Minidisc in Malaysia, not as long as media is available here and units in other markets.

Model owned: MZ-NH900 Discs owned: 6 1GB hi-MD discs, 15 80min bianca Minidiscs Primary uses: Band jam session recording for after-session review; portable music player I've just been told that Malaysia will not be seeing any new Minidisc player/recorder models by a Sony Style store employee. I hope that this does not remain permanent.

Problem solved. The culprit was indeed the mpg123dsf codec installed by the MDCF SonicStage 2.3 installer. Removed it by following the instructions in another thread:

Already done. All clean. ffdshow, but, as I said, I never had this problem before and I've had ffdshow on since I first got the MD in January.

Sorry. Forgot my OS. Windows XP Home SP2. Well, that's just it. I didn't have this problem either until recently. Maybe if we figure this out faelnor will be able to fix his problem too.

PC Specs: Compaq Presario X1400AP Intel Centrino 1.6 MHz 512MB RAM Windows XP Home SP2 About 6 GB free disc space, recently scandisked and defragmented MD Specs: MZ-NH900 Sonicstage 3.2, Internet US/Europe version (the only Sony program on the computer) Problem: Under certain conditions, Sonicstage crashes upon converting any audio file to ATRAC3. Especially pronounced during mass conversion. Details: I actually started having this problem after uninstalling my installation of Sonicstage 3.2, trying the MDCF full installer, uninstalling that after seeing that it doesn't work with my NH900, then reinstalling Sonicstage 3.2, all in an attempt to fix a static problem in MP3 -> ATRAC3 132kbps conversion. I did this according to the instructions on this forum. Now, when I convert any music file, if I had just finished converting another file previously and if I attempt the new conversion within a period of time, Sonicstage will crash citing an error in omgjukebx.exe. This happens with any audio file. There is no problem with the actual file; it's just that attempting another conversion immediately after doing one ("immediately" varying anywhere between 0 seconds to about 1 minute) will cause Sonicstage to die. This means that mass conversion is impossible, but mass file transfers via SS to the MD itself work fine. There is one exception to this: ripping from audio CD to ATRAC3 goes without a hitch, although i've only done this for a two-song single. I'm guessing this is a problem with the encoder either clashing with something or just something screwed up with the installation. I've tried uninstalling and reinstalling several times but the problem keeps returning. I think I should also note that I installed the mp3 codec that came with the MDCF installer; that's a possible culprit for the clashing, but I can't figure out how to remove the codec and disabling it doesn't seem to help. I also have ffdshow installed, but after disabling the mp3 filter I had never had a problem until now. A solution would be much appreciated; I don't really relish the prospect of having to do manual file-by-file ATRAC conversion. Thanks in advance.

Not likely. Windows Longhorn is supposed to be heavy on the DRM and part of the laughably named "trusted computing" concept. Consumer chips will be the target for hardware DRM because of this.

Nevermind the protests of people who download albums off of P2P; I find the idea of giving someone else that much control over stuff on my computer scary. There's so much potential for losing entire drives just like that - and don't think that hackers/crackers won't find a way to fiddle with IDE redirection to do just that.

If it's a bug, then it's probably replicable. I had trouble finding the two threads you mentioned before I made this thread, so I'd appreciate it if you could point them out to me. Maybe looking at what other people did will help me figure out the precise set of actions leading to the bug. In any case, this has only happened once out of the 5-6 uploading sessions I've done over the month or so I've had my MZ-NH900. I think I'll hang on to it and try to avoid the problem; I'll only send it in if it becomes more frequent. Thanks for the info.

First of all, it might help if you use paragraphs next time. They'll help you mentally divide what you want to say into manageable portions. That way, you end up posting something that isn't quite so confusing. ^_~ For info on the second-gen Hi-MD players (models, specs, features, etc), go here. Basically, the second gen will be widely available come April and will more or less mirror the range of the first gen players. As for whether to get one or not, you have to ask yourself if you want native MP3 support or not (I'm assuming there won't be a firmware upgrade for the 1st gen players, but I may be wrong). If you answer yes, then get one of the 2nd gen; otherwise, the 1st gen players will do nicely. If you decide to go for 1st gen, I suggest waiting until the 2nd gen players are released (c'mon, it's just like a couple of weeks or so); prices for them might go down a bit. Hope that helps.

I was using a Hi-MD. And yeah, I didn't have any problems before either. I figure next time I'm just gonna track the recording, upload it unnamed and rename them on the computer. Safer that way. I sure wish I knew what went wrong that one time, though.

Hi, I'm sorta kinda new here and just bought my first MD (the MZ-NH900) about a month ago. I've been lurking around here way before then doing my research before going for MD, though. I'm not sure where this was supposed to go, so I figured this would be the best place for it. Recently, I tried uploading a jam session I had just recorded. It was already split into tracks before I plugged in the MD player, but unnamed. Before uploading them using Sonicstage 2.3, I decided to rename the tracks. That's when the problem happened. Several of the tracks suddenly refused to play, returning a Play Error message. This was strange as they were playing quite well before the renaming. I had also previously uploaded other recordings to my computer through SonicStage with no issues (in fact, I'm pretty pleased by it and didn't suffer any of the problems frequently reported on these forums). I'm not asking whether it's possible to get those tracks back - I figured they were dead and they weren't particularly good sessions anyway, so I erased the disc after I had finished uploading and converting. I just want to check if anyone has had this problem before and/or knows the cause of it so that I can avoid it next time. I figure I messed up in the renaming process somewhere, but I would just like to be sure. Any info would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance.