Tom Ellard

If you have any application made by Sony Media that processes ATRAC then copying the plugin to another seems to work. I could take my ACID plugin and drop it into VEGAS, the ATRAC features were then in there as well. A full DirectShow version would be more useful though. Actually an iTunes plug in would be 1000x more useful.

It doesn't help. A short while ago I was on an international flight. The lady with whom I was travelling pulled out her iPod, selected her track and closed her eyes. I pull out my minidisc. Reached for the box of discs which I had previously wedged into the seat pocket in front of me. Turned on the reading light. Shuffled through the discs until I found the genre I was thinking about. Turned the player upside down and carfully tried to put in a disc without elbowing the people either side of me. Once the disc loaded I shuffled through the tracks, got to something which wasn't what I really wanted but I couldn't be arsed looking through the discs again and started it up. Then I could turn off the reading light again, thinking of course that NEXT TIME I'd use a pod. Minidiscs will never be popular listening devices again so everybody just got to get used to it.

Yes I am that person. www.sevcom.com [on topic] I have three of those MiniDisc things, including the camera one (sorry I don't remember model numbers and all that crazy stuff). Apple gave me a Nano, but the girlfriend got passed that. And two of those PSPs. [/on topic]

For what it is worth when you drag and drop an MP3 to a PlayStation Portable and also use Sonic Stage to do the transfer again the two sound identical. They sound different to the track on Hi-MD. I really think that Hi-MDs just can't play back MP3 very well, rather than any Sony weirdness.

Yep, I know it takes more than one step Well I ain't Mavis P Squid.

The adjustments to Sonic Stage don't really tell you anything about MiniDisc. Sonic Stage is used for the Sony hard drive players, as well as the PlayStation Portable (if you want to use ATRAC that is). Seeing as the audio on Sony's UMD discs is ATRAC and that's also the format of their music downloads, Sonic Stage and ATRAC will go on, MiniDisc or not. Now that UMD is out, there will never be pre-recorded minidiscs again. Why bother? UMD holds 1.8Gb with pictures and everything. So that leaves two markets for MD. Little japanese girls that will buy anything cheap and translucent pink, and older blokes that record live concerts. The extreme ends of the scene. (And incidently some of the latter that use avatars of some of the former. ) The girlies can eventually be satisfied with MemoryStick devices and the blokes are happy with a small set of high end devices, that record to ATRAC Lossless. For everybody else there's iPod. Anyone wanna buy a DAT recorder?

Pardon me if I have misunderstood. But I opened an ATRAC file in Media Player Classic and it played the whole thing (no time limit). That is on a machine that has SS installed... I guess you mean an ATRAC player on any machine. It always seems so strange that you can drag and drop your MP3's and AAC files to a PlayStation Portable. But you can't drag and drop to a minidisc. I tried dragging an ATRAC file to a PSP and it didn't like it. You have to use Sonic Stage. SONY are so weird

Couldn't work out why SS32 was crashing when I tried to open an album with no artwork. Reality was that they did have artwork but it's not in a format that SS can understand. So SS does what it loves to do and CRASHES AND BURNS OK, so get iTunes and install it, find the tracks you need to use and remove the artwork from the files. Looks like they might be GIF - is SONY too cheap to pay the license? Don't spend too long in iTunes - you might like it too much

One rumour mixed up in this conversation was that Aibo was going to be dropped. Aibo is not dropped. There is a new model. http://www.smh.com.au/news/breaking/sony-u...7804636205.html Rumours are based on snatches of information and hearsay and obviously in the case of the dog, the rumour merchants are unaware of the developments taking place. I'd pour a little cold water on this. We all have very nice MD units we are using now, and should just continue to use, and look forward to newer technologies that could be better again. SONY have some concerns at the moment and promoting the little wheels isn't really important at a time when thousands are about to lose their jobs. If I was still desperately using my Amiga computer in 2005, refusing to use a PC because it was 'not the same', well I'd be silly.