rudiegirl54 Posted November 9, 2004 Report Share Posted November 9, 2004 Hi, I've been reading this forum and so far have found it very helpful. Thank you! You're all way more helpful than Sony! About two years ago I bought a black NetMD MZ-N707. I bought it to do a four hour continuous recording once a week. I wanted to do a high-quality, stereo live recording every week and to archive it. In the past year, I've started to do more with the recording which includes breaking it up into tracks (afterwards of course) and converting it to an mp3 that I post on my website. I record it in LP-4 mode to get one continuous track of 3-4 hours. Shortly after I bought the NetMD, I discovered that it cannot upload from MD to PC which I found to be a huge pain in the neck. What I am doing now is plugging the MD into the back of my PC from the headphone out, fastforwarding it an hour (the part I want is in the middle) and then setting it up to re-record into the PC via Soundforge as a wav. From there I convert to mp3 in one track for my website, and break the recording up into tracks in Soundforge to burn a cd. This re-recording is a pain in the neck. It takes about 10 minutes just to ffwd to the spot I want, and then I am worried that I am losing sound quality by re-recording. Recently, the unit has been acting up where it stops randomly for no reason. Since I am re-recording an hour-long set, I usually set it up and then walk away, so I have to come back and hit play while Soundforge has just recorded a big gap which I have to edit later. Doing this EVERY WEEK is totally time consuming and I hate it. If the format is digital, I shouldn't have to resample it! I might as well have recorded to cassette tape! I want to get a new unit and I was looking at the Hi-MD to see if it could solve the problems I have. I want to upload the entire track to a PC to edit - I can't handle the buttons on the tiny MD unit, which were made for editing and trackmarking as you go, not after the fact, and are not as precise as software - and then I want to convert parts of the track to wav and mp3 files WITHOUT resampling. I read about the HiMDRenderer and the new Sony Wav conversion program but I am really scared about what some people have mentioned as "trashing" of files. These are live recordings that cannot be reproduced. I could back them up, but not if it means resampling in realtime (in which case there would be no point to me upgrading to HiMD). Please help! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Christopher Posted November 10, 2004 Report Share Posted November 10, 2004 Welcome to the forums. :happy: What's your maximum budget? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rudiegirl54 Posted November 10, 2004 Author Report Share Posted November 10, 2004 If I can find it on Amazon, then it doesn't matter. Otherwise, no more than three hundred, like to have it closer to 2. I guess I am really more interested in the software side of things than the minidisc. When we got the NetMD, my bf spent a whole day trying to use the jukebox stuff it came with and then when he discovered it couldn't upload, he said to scrap it. We only want to use the thing for recording, I don't ever want to use it for listening and therefore don't need the dl function. A one-shot upload is also not going to work for me since I have been using minidiscs to archive material. I guess if I only get one shot, then I will have to start burning to data cd to archive (my material is longer than 74 min) but I probably won't be able to fit the entire wav on there. I just want to have maximum capacity, portability, and quality. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aeriyn Posted November 11, 2004 Report Share Posted November 11, 2004 Next time, please don't double post. Edit your previous post to add new information. :happy: Anyhow, to answer all of your questions, it does not sound like MD is for you. Even Hi-MD is fundamentally limited by Sony's DRM to allow you only ONE upload of your analog recorded tracks. And once they are uploaded, they are either gone or unplayable off the MD itself. Even if SonicStage trashes the track. And a good percentage of the time, SonicStage destroys tracks uploaded at random. You could always use the old method (recording to PC real-time via the USB playback option) but that isn't all that much better. It's still slow and real-time. There are several CF-based recorders out there, but they are quite a bit more expensive than Hi-MD. Perhaps if you found a way to live with the limitations of Hi-MD, it would perform well for you, but if getting the tracks to the computer faster than real-time is the most important thing to you, I would not use Hi-MD. And it sounds like your N707 may have a problem with the magnetic write head. I don't know all that much about fixing it, so I can't help you there. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rudiegirl54 Posted November 12, 2004 Author Report Share Posted November 12, 2004 What's CF? Let me know, I will look it up and do some comparison research. Thank you!! :grin: Oh and sorry about the double posting. It was just train-of-thought. I'm sorry if it sounds like I'm venting to you guys, it comes from 2 years of no one at Sony, Sears, Shirokiya or any other electronics store for that matter listening to me, as well as friends who listen but don't really help. Two days of reading this forum I found the answers to minidisc questions that people for two years couldn't give me a straight answer for. :laugh: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aeriyn Posted November 12, 2004 Report Share Posted November 12, 2004 What's CF?CompactFlash, or other makes and manners of flash memory. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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