Medhayo

If you read the whole three pages, you will see that the design of this device was all about superficial cosmetics, not about technology. It is all about flashy looks, marketing and hype. MD is technologically obsolete already - technologically it makes no sense whatsoever to store the data on minidisk when you can buy a 2GB SD card for 15 Euros and plug it directly into the computer. The only reason I recently (about a year ago) bought a HiMD (although the older MDs I've been using for some years) is that the MP3 recorders are nothing but crap. If you put the electronics of a minidisk recorder into an MP3 recorder with a 2GB SD card you'll get a better product that is cheaper to manufacture and is completely silent (unlike the MD), and which uses far less power. That is why I say the MD is technologically obsolete. But unfortunately the manufacturers are interested in nothing other than to exploit and manipulate the desire of consumers, to make as much money as possible. Hence the infatuation with the cosmetics of these "Creative Designers" instead of concentrating on good oldfashioned questions of engineering. So why are all the MP3 machines crap? Of course to compress MP3 at good quality in realtime requires processing power, and therefore pocket consumer MP3 devices have to make compromises. (Playback is OK, but that is useless for a recording device). However the existence of the MD proves that that is not the reason - because the MD recorders can record excelent sound. The real reason comes back to marketing, and protectionism. I believe the MP3 recorders are deliberately crippled in quality to protect the recorded music market (especialy from Sony), because Sony don't want people using a cheap mass-produced MP3 recorder to record live concerts and sharing large numbers of high quality recordings on the internet. (If Sony was not involved directly in the music industry we would probably have high quality ATRAC devices like MP3 recorders today). From the technology perspective they could make an ATRAC recorder with an SD card slot with a performance better than the best available HiMD which could probably be mass produced and sold for under 15 Euros - but that of course is not what the manufacturers want! Too many conflicting business interests. I am sure there are certain factions within Sony who would have liked to withdraw the MD completely a few years ago - from a marketing perspective they have already done so!!! - it is hard to find the disks, and minidisks are completely lost from the public eye due to lack of marketing and the strong emphasis on MP3.

No answers to this problem available?

I was previously using SonicStage 4.2 on a Sony VAIO to copy original audio from HiMD recorded on an MZ-NH700 into WAV format. It worked OK, but my old VAIO was desperately slow and couldn't handle very long tracks. Recently I got a modern computer and at the time had no internet, so I tried installing SonicStage from some installation files copied off the VAIO (these were the installation files expanded by the SS installer from the files downloaded from the internet into a temporary folder, which SS deletes when the installation is completed). The installation appeared to install completely without error, and the program opened and could read and play the HiMD's and edit track names etc. I deleted a couple of tracks, then selected a track I wanted to copy and pressed the transfer button - SS immediately bleeped with the same sound it makes when deleting a track, and the track disappeared!!! Nohing was copied, and the deletion was instant, and there was no error message or any complaint from the program. Is there any way I can undelete the deleted file, or recreate the TOC? What happens when a track is deleted from a HiMD disc? Could I do anything with a Windows disc editor such as DiskEdit? Thanks for any help, MB-WBD PS - For the benefit of those interested in SonicStage errors, here is some more information about that aspect - I have since made a fresh install of version 4.3 from the internet using the SS installer, which works OK, but the above error seems very strange. The manual installation method worked when tested on the VAIO, but at least three things are different - software installed on the system at the time of download (does the installer check?); operating system language; and the VAIO system folder structure which was very heavily customised while the new one was default.

Has nothing happened in the year and a half since the last posting, or has it been shifted somewhere else? Why has all this good work apparently suddenly stopped? What happened to the Sourceforge project?