Creating leagacy MDs on a HiMD

[Sparky191]

Was trying to create MD's on my HiMD. I format the MD as a NetMD then transferred tracks at SP or LP2 as it actually is (was this fixed in SS4?). However it takes forever. I thik it would have been almost as quick to record realtime.

Any thoughts from those who does this on a regular basis?

[Tunster]

  Sparky191 said:

Was trying to create MD's on my HiMD. I format the MD as a NetMD then transferred tracks at SP or LP2 as it actually is (was this fixed in SS4?). However it takes forever. I thik it would have been almost as quick to record realtime.

Any thoughts from those who does this on a regular basis?

I haven't tried this out yet. This is because there are no drivers for Windows XP x64 and I cannot modify them to work. I will however set it up on my laptop which now has SS4.

Are you using USB 2.0 ports? If you're still using USB 1.1, you will get far slower transfer rates.

I'll give it a go on my laptop (which is USB 1.1) and tell you how it goes.

[Sparky191]

USB2 or USB1 won't make a difference. The HiMD itself can't write to the MD at USB1 speeds never mind USB2. I was using USB2 though.

[Avrin]

SP transfer is not fixed in SS40. Still transfers as ATRAC3@132kbps. At least on my RH10. Somebody should try it on an RH1.

[KJ_Palmer]

Do you have (many) other applications running in the background? If so it's probably best to close down anything unnecessary. The conversion to ATRAC 3 (if needed) is pretty CPU intensive, but all the same LP2 transfers seem to take about as long on my laptop as other transfers, ie. still much faster than realtime.

[Sparky191]

Well its a dual Xeon 2.4Ghz machine and it wasn't doing much at the time. I was transcoding the files aswell, but it wasn't waiting on the transcoding. It had them all transcoded before the first one had transferred. Maybe I'm just too used to USB2 transfer speeds.

[Avrin]

To clear things up about transferring tracks in legacy SP mode I just tested this in SS40 (using my RH10). After ripping a track in WAV, I switched SS40 to the NetMD SP mode, and started the transfer. What really happens at this point is that SS40 encodes the WAV file into a temporary LP2 (ATRAC3@132kbps) file. You may find this file in your "C:\Documents and Settings\[user Name]\Local Settings\Temp" folder. It has a TMP extension, but if you copy it to another location (the file in the TEMP folder exists only until the transfer process is complete, then gets deleted), and change the extension to OMG, you will be able to import it into SS40 and play it (SS40 will show that it is an ATRAC3@132kbps file).

Then, during transfer, SS40 feeds this file into the unit (since SS40 does not have an ATRAC codec). The unit transcodes it into ATRAC@292 kbps, and records it. It is this process that takes a lot of time, regardless of the speed of you computer. After recording, SS40 shows that this is a "Stereo" track (and its size corresponds to the SP mode). The unit shows the track as SP.

After recording this file via analog back to my computer, and checking its frequency components, I found out that it is actually somewhat worse than if it were transferred in LP2. The frequency cut inherent in ATRAC3@132kbps is present, but there is much more noise above this frequency. Although some of that noise may have come from recording via analog. But, in any case, SP mode transfers in SS40 are almost worthless. Their only purpose is to provide compatibility with pre-MDLP equipment.

Edited June 9, 2006 by Avrin

[Sparky191]

While I was using MP3's as source and expected some artifacting from transcoding, the results were worse than I expected. The transcoding from 132>>292 would explain why. Didn't realise it did that. i thought it was a transfer of LP2. Would also explain why it took longer than expected. Pity.