vishcompany

In the manual of my RH-910 they explained, that the wall adaptor is capable of delivering more power than the USB port and that the player would never get fully charged via USB; The RH1, when connected to the adaptor charges at full power for one hour (reaching 80%) and the rest takes another 2-3 hours at lower current, in order to get this type of battery properly charged. Well, the 910 has a different kind of battery, but the USB port will still deliver less power, so I figure, the "Charging ...min left" display will only show, if the unit receives 'full power' from the AC adaptor. just my guess

==> As I have no true SP player: Did anybody try already, whether it is possible to play such fake SP tracks in real SP player?

I have to admit, I did not look at it from this angle yet; also I was not aware, that there are no car- and home decks in HiMD. My own situation is, that I have some 50 MDs which are mostly in LP2, so I now use the RH1 to upload the stuff and download it back in HiMD-mode at the same compression, which wins me half of the discs to use otherwise. But that's anyway a side-effect, as I was mainly looking for a decent recorder for myself, which allows also uploading of tracks done by colleagues in SP. Anyway watching the RH1 while it was recording (downloading) in SP I had the feeling, that this procedure is mechanically wearing out the device much more than any other activity. Plus the fact, that it takes really long, it maybe really makes sense to stick to your CD/MD minisystem and have less work, even if it takes a little longer. The RH1 offers this feature as an extra, I wonder if it is really made for it. It works so much nicer, smoother and faster in any other mode. cheers

hmmm... reading the original post by cornblatt, he wrote about both issues, up- and downloading.

Sorry for asking stupidly: Where did you read, that it took 15-30 minutes to import into SS? If I'm not mistaken cornblatt wrote of 15 minutes importing and 30 minutes downloading. Please correct me, if I'm wrong. Otherwise I agree, importing should be faster. Downloading in SP appearently is just a very slow process. cheers

ok guys, here are some figures, hope my world is real enough for you: AMD Athlon @ 2.0 GHz XP home / SonicStage 4.0 USB 2.0 The source is a SP-MD of 57:42 / 30 tracks, which originally was copied from a CD through line-in. I ran three rounds, each of them included conversion to WAV after transfer: A: SP-PCM through a 4 port USB 2.0 Hub with a webcam connected (and other devices on the other USB plugs on the computer). B: The same with the RH1 connected directly to the computer, all other USB devices disconnected. C: SP-256 Kbit, through the Hub etc. The percentages given next to the times are CPU-load during the procedure. Run | transfer time | conversion time | total time A | 5:55 / 40-50% | 2:05 / 10-100% | 8:00 B | 6:07 / 40-50% | 2:19 / 10-100% | 8:26 C | 8:28 / 50-60% | 1:01 / 100 % . | 9:29 It seems, that the RH1 is not affected by other devices being connected on the USB ports. The slightly longer time in run B could be explained, that the unit had to spin up first before the transfer could start, which - if I remember correctly - was not the case in A, the RH1 was already spinning. It also had to spin up first in run C, so maybe B and C are a better comparison. Why converting also took longer in B I could not tell, it only confirms my theory, that computers never really do the same thing twice, even if they could be expected to do so... Transfer to PCM is faster, while conversion from 256Kbit is faster on the others side; it's interesting, that the CPU load was shooting up and down from 10-100% while converting from PCM to WAV, but just went straight up to 100% and stayed there, when doing so from 256 Kbit. Probably this has to do with the reading speed of the HD? (which is a SATA 2, of which I honestly don't know if it really performs 300MByte/sec, I actually doubt it) So if you take roughly 10 minutes for one MD60 (provided, your computer is not all too old), you end up at ~ 13.20 hours of working time for 80 MDs, sounds like it could be done in a weekend, if you avoid editing titles etc. About computing speed in general, I basically can confirm the figures of Marck from MDCenter.nl. He states 10x for SP-PCM on a Pentium IV @ 2,8 MHz, my computer is somewhat slower (and a different CPU) and it performs at 9,75x, which is close enough; maybe Marck brought his numbers to a round figure, which might lead to the conclusion, that even processors at slower speed than my 2.0 GHz might do the job at 10x, as my CPU was only busy at about 40-50%. I guess the bottleneck is still the USB port. But this is all guessing, maybe someone with a machine at 1-1,5 GHz could drop a few figures here... Hope this makes sense to you, cheers, r.

I got curious and performed a few "tests", which in the beginning were not systematic, but still, here are some numbers for those, who are interested: I was using SonicStage 4.0 on a 2.0 GHz AMD Athlon 64 with USB 2.0 through a Hub. MZ-RH1 and MZ-RH901 several 74 minutes MDs. The first CD consisted of 37 tracks with a complete duration of 58:10 Importing into SS 4: 2:40 Conversion within SS (Sorry, don't remeber exact details here): 1:21 Downloading into RH1: 2:40 Next I took a CD of 65:15 / 19 tracks Importing to SS: 2:45 Downloading this onto the RH1 to MD-SP, SS warned me, that this would take longer than other formats. It indeed does: 32:42 Downloading the same material in Hi-SP took 53 seconds... (being 64 Kbit) Next I hooked up the RZ-901: I started a download to MD-SP, but when the estimated time was some 30 or so minutes I aborted. Downloading "Standard" (64 Kbit again) took 1:26 Downloading to MD-LP2: 4:18 Downloading to 48 Kbit: 2:45, of which most of the time was taken by converting the files on the fly, transforming them was done in a second (file by file). Trying to be a bit more systematic, I took yet another CD and imported it to 352 kBit. It's quite an old one with scratches, so the CD drive was spinning half of the CD slowly, correcting errors I suppose. When there were no problems on the surface it spun at the same speed as it had been doing with the other two CDs. However, importing this one took 7:16, being a CD of 60:45 / 18 tracks Downloading this onto the RH-901 in 352 Kbit took 5:30 Downloading onto the RH-1 in 352 Kbit: 3:20 (- Doing the same with my webcam unplugged from the USB-hub was just the same speed) Downloading onto the RH-901 & converting on the fly to 48 Kbit: 3:00 Same procedure on the RH1: 2:55 (again, most of the time was taken converting, on both machines) Seems, the SP-issue has to do less with the RH1 but maybe is a problem of recording in this format in general? For the rest the RH1 is faster than the RH-901 and therefore I suppose than other 2nd gen. recorders, too. Being hooked up and operating, the RH1 is somewhat noisy; after the download is done it keeps spinning (and whining) for a while, pushing the stop-button helps on this one. Importing into SonicStage appearently depends a lot on the state of the CD and the reading-speed of the CD-drive and I can imagine, also on the CPU-power of the computer being used. Watching the CPU load in the task manager while importing a CD, transcoding the material being read in took some +/- 50%. Hope this makes some sense to you. cheers, r. (edit of some typo)

Hello everybody, I'm completely new here and first would like to say thanks for all the useful information I found here; really helpful! (OT: Being a musician, I got back to MD after some years of absence and just got an RH-901 in the next shop, hoping I could upload some self-recorded SP tracks, done by a friend on an older mashine, well, nope!, got frustrated and found this forum and the information, that Sony just released the RH1 with all it's nice abilities and luckily got one quite quickly, so here I am, not sure yet if I want to keep the 901 as a backup or sell it off. (I like the scroll wheel and somewhat larger display, but mp3 indeed sounds somewhat muffled and in my euro-version the customer-equ. function is disabled, not sure if I want to hack it) /OT) As I obviously want to edit music and read here about the ATRAC codec plugin, I wanted to give this a try. So I downloaded & installed SoundForge 8.0 regularily. Downloaded the ATRAC-plugin and installed as instructed in the readme-file that comes with it. Next I uploaded the files once more in SS 4.0 and removed DRM as described. If I now want to import a file into SF it shows the ATRAC files properly in the selection menu, but when I select one and press import I get the following error message: "The file format plugin for the specified format was not properly initialized" Am I missing anything? Thanks for any hints.