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I'm selling my whole collection of hardware and software and accessories, check 'em out and contact me via the 'Contact Me' buttons. Sony Hi-MD Minidisc MZR-H10 Black MP3 Recorder/Player http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vie...me=STRK:MESE:IT Sealed Discs Bundle! Sony 80min, Sony ES Series TDK etc http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vie...me=STRK:MESE:IT StoreCore 32-capacity and 3 x ALPEX 8-cap. Zip cases http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vie...me=STRK:MESE:IT 55 Disc Bundle inc. Rare TDK XS-iV Design Line discs! http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vie...me=STRK:MESE:IT Thanks!

Oh calm down and have a cup of tea! There's still a huge and viable market in MD in Japan and the resale market everywhere else. People say tape is dead but I still see Ferric and Chrome tapes being sold in shops. Personally I regard my investment in Hi-MD as a wise one. I benefit from using and enhancing the capacity of my existing MD media, I get great battery life, it's reliable, robust, sounds great and I can record and I'm so used to SS now that I can easily enjoy music or podcasts delivered through teh interweb.

Side-car? Heh, i like that. Yes, i think it's 100% safe. I use 2500mah 1.2v Ni-MH's in mine with no issues. Where did you read otherwise?

This bit is interesting: C'mon Sony - drag and drop recording and no DRM silliness please. More at http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/22/business...ml?pagewanted=2

IMO 1Gb are ideal for collections of podcasts. I like building compendiums, so I have started a 1Gb disc of stuff from itconversations.com. I convert mp3's in "speech" quality of 64kbps to Hi-LP and they sound fine even though they are transcoded. LP2 - I have to say that LP2 sounds excellent when the source is CD. I used LP2 heavily to transcode from mp3 128~192~256kbps (mainly tracks from ocremix.org) and found the quality for portable/car to be adequate. Now that I've got my 2nd Gen Hi-MD though, I feel like remastering all my old discs with the original mp3!

Thanks, yes this way works. Converting several hours of mp3 to Hi-LP took ages, but I suppose it makes one appreciate the final disk in some weird way :-). I thought I might have a solution: Once I had both formats in my library, I changed the settings to say 'Transfer as ATRAC3plus 66 (Hi-LP)'. I transferred 1 track, but on the MD that format was listed as mp3. Grrr! I had to delete the mp3 of each and every track to get SS to transfer over the Hi-LP file. Gah, what a rigermarole! Where can I make suggestions to the SS code monkeys then?

Thanks, it's a bit of an annoyance really but thanks anyway. The best option is this - view the tracks by choosing 'View > All Tracks' then sort by date imported in reverse order. You can then see all the tracks imported as a list and drag those across. Another problem I've found is that all but 1 out of the 10 mp3's will play! I see 'Cannot Play' appear if I try to play them. Searching the forums and examing the mp3 files closesly, I've found that they do not strictly match the mp3 parametes supports by Sony, eg. they are not 44KHz sampling rate, some are mono etc. These are low rate speech broadcasts and therefore do not have to have musical fidelity. I suppose I can resort to Lame or something to upsample them or something but hopefully they will build something into SS to handle this case and warn the user. Another shock - I tried to convert the things to several ATRAC formats... and they stay as mp3 (no transcoding) unless the quality of the original mp3 is of a equal or higher bitrate! Your second mug of frosty root beer is for telling me how I can get around this annoyance. :-) Thank you muchly.

Thanks for your reply. I was hoping for a simple option somewhere like 'just tick this checkbox' :-) In the end I moved all the tracks on the MD from their group folders to the 'root'. I got weird results doing so though, more info tomorrow. COuld it be that Hi-MD is like NetMD in that tracks within groups cannot be deleted? eg. user beware if you try it.

When importing a bunch of mp3s into My Library (SonicStage 3.1), each file tends to be grouped into albums by what looks like the album-field of the ID3 tag. Obviously this means that the disc gets this many groups created on them (where album = group). How can I import a bunch of mp3 files and have them appear as single tracks in My Library such that they appear in a single "group" (or no group) on the disc. A frosty root beer to anyone who can help me with this!

Sorry, but I think none of them are any good! :-) The one that came with my old R900 was the best, then in true Sony fashion they make a different model every year. The NH910 one was a little step backwards cause of the plethora of buttons and now the one that comes with the RH10 makes it almost impossible to alter the volume with one hand unless you're the Hulk. I reduced the cabling by plugging my Senn MX200 phones directly into the headphone jack of my RH10. Much simpler and about 95% less tangle situations! I use the controls on the unit itself and the lovely OLED to tell me whats playing. After all, why spend all that dosh on this unit if it's gonna stay out of sight?

Welcome to MDCF! As mentioned by another guy, both fotos show black MZRH10s, but the top one has light catching the front surface making it look greyish (or 'grayish' for my north american friends). All MZRH10 have the blue on black OLED displays in the bottom picture. The top photo looks like it is showing the protective plastic film with a pre-printed display that comes affixed to the unit when you first take it out the box. It protects the screen from scrathces ehile in the box. If you've got a RH10 in the post winging it's way to you, be careful when you peel the thing off. (It looks like it's from the ND3 HDD walkman but I digress.)

Sorry, I thought it was vice-versa. My layperson understanding is that VBR reduces the bitrate at quieter/less complicated sections of the track, therefore smaller filesize. With CBR you get better or at least the same quality but always with higher filesize. Explain and enlighten me please, greenmachine!

No, it doesn't. It depends what button you press to 'wake up' the unit. I usualy press play/enter to wake it up. I'm a little unhappy at some things in the MZRH10 operating system - eg. not saving Shuffle mode in the disc memory.

I like your idea, but what put me off DAB was that the portable radio's are apparantly very power hungry. This is the reason that the last time I wnet shopping for a portable radio, I got a standard FM/AM PLL digital type. Am I wrong about portable DAB radios? Other than that, a DAB and Hi-MD deck would be great thing to have especially with TiVO-style timer recording functions.

I'm using a powered USB hub to connect my Hi-MD portable. I noticed that if the power to the hub was off, Windows XP would detect it as as external storage device but it would be invisible to SonicStage. USB devices that require electrical current from the PC do not always operate correctly through an unpowered hub with many other devices connected! However once I had power going to the hub, Windows XP found and loaded the drivers for the Hi-MD and it was visible in SonicStage once again. Make sure your USB hub, if you're using it, has a working power supply (or the switch on the hub is set to operate off the mains supply!). Failing that, locate a USB port that has a non-essential device, remove it and plug in your Hi-MD portable into that USB port.

I havn't seen a single Hi-MD in car deck! http://www.minidisc.org/part_Sony_MDX-C800REC.html from that page, my Spidey-sense says that you have in fact a car deck that supports good ol' SP format only. This means that you need to transfer your music in SP format (also known as 'fake LP2' but don't worry about that), from SonicStage to your Hi-MD player. Give that a try and you'll be rocking.

Thesedays I only use Windows XP for 2 things - SonicStage and Palm Desktop to sync my Tungsten T3 (and even then there are some good opensource alternatives to that out there). Other than that I use Fedora Core 4 (fedora.redhat.com) or Ubuntu (www.ubuntulinux.org) for a high quality FREE desktop operating system.Sony deciding to opensource SonicStage would make me very happy indeed. Imagine an army of opensource developers enhancing, stablelizing and polishing up OpenSonicStage! The opensource model has produced example of such good software - Mozilla Firefox, OpenOffice, Apache web server, MySQL database etc etc...! They can keep the ATRAC and DRM library closesourced, just let us turbocharge the interface to our music and MD players and put some fun into it (skins, plugins, hooks into 3rd party apps etc). There may be some hope for this given Sonys relationship with opensource so far - support for Linux on Playstation2 and 3, opensource tech based on BSD in the PSP networking stack. There are signs it's relinquishing it's proprietary-everything stance and being more progressive to new technology such as peer2peer (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/08/23/sony_p2p_digital_pool/). just my 2p's worth!

LTJ Bukem - Points in Time LTK Bukem - Earth

The thing Google are really superb at is creating something that is technically good and then getting mindshare and a good reputation for being technically good. This is the best way to produce products IMHO, less amrketing and more being sold on it's own merits. This is the reason Google spread in the first place, being a technically good, fast search engine. I think you're taking a very simplistic view my friend. Sure, some will leave for the cheapest price but the cheapest thing is not necessarily the best. This is where the term 'false economy' comes from. :-) I sincerely hope Google get into VOIP. They will hardly be alone. I hope they raise the game of Vonage, BT, Skype and all the others. I use gmail, google search, desktop search and my decision to use those was based on technical superiority and 'it just works'-ness each time. Anyway, I liked Damage's ode to Terminator - as long as those googledroids don't demand my clothes, boots and my motorcycle I'll be fine. :-)

Bowling for Columbine - Michael Moore's documentary of gun crime in the USA and the USAs fascination with guns. Entertaining and shocking in equal measure. His interview with Charleton Heston is quality, although I was very upset with Hestons opinion on why gun crime is such a problem in the USA...

Sounds good, I'd like to see a photo of that one. How about some photo's for the Gellery section of the forum? I've got a bunch of "designer" discs that I'll take photo's of. I remember some years back that Sony did that with a cassette tape (metal body and screws), part of a Millenium collection I think. Sony have their 'Qualia' luxury brand (Check out this handcrafted, yes handcrafted, MD player: Product 017 at http://www.sony.jp/products/Consumer/QUALI...cts/index.html) it remains to be seen wether they will launch Hi-MD or discs under that banner.

Thats right... but they do look absolutely Ninja: http://www.digital-e-uk.com/d-e/images/md_sony_es.jpg Here's hoping TDK or Sony bring about another "design line" of Hi-MD discs, I loved the MD ones.

It's 60Gb Maxtor DiamondMax, I think it has a 8Mb cache, IDE. There about 21Gb free, the rest is taken up by Linux Fedora Core 4 dual boot. Woah 64-bit processing, very nice. There's no doubt SATA will improve my overall PC experience, but I feel that CPU power is what is holding me back. I would hazard a guess you have at least 1Gb of 64-bit quick RAM too. Both you and that Sparky chap are running high-end CPU machines and you're both not tapping your feet waiting for CD encodings. 512Mb is the limit of my mobo and more RAM = better performance is a general rule of thumb. I got this PC back in 2001/2002 so it's probably time for an upgrade soon. Like some forum members who are waiting for 3rd Gen Hi-MD, I will probably wait for the next big processor release so i can save up for and pick up something really quick. Thanks

Yep, they will work perfectly. I use Sony ES discs with my Hi-MD and they reformat just fine. AFAIK, 'ES' means 'Enhanced Standard' which means the discs are constructed out of better meterials and are built for reduced vibration during playback. Looks like a great bundle there, good luck.

I'm a SonicStage 3.1 user, transferring a typical CD to ATRAC3plus 256 takes me about 15 ~ 20 minutes. I read somewhere else on the forum that one guy is doing this in 5 minutes on average. My PC is a PIII 800Mhz 512Mb running Windows XP Pro SP2. I have the 'classic Windows' view and 32-bit colour turned on. What are the best ways to improve performance? Things I have done already: - no background on my desktop - closed down programs that stick around in the system tray/background (Picasa2, Anti-Spyware, Google Desktop Search) - not running any programs while conversion happens, and if I do, I am usually running Mozilla Firefox and windows explorer only - Done 'Optimize My Library' feature in SS - Deleted temporary files (via SS and Windows XP) I feel my memory capacity is enough and that the CPU power is a big factor in those ATRAC conversion operation, correct? Will I benefit from an upgrade to 3.2? Or is that a bigger resource hog? I will upgrade for increased stability/speed but I don't have a use for the new ATRAC3plus bitrates.