MZ-RH1 transfer woes...

[gregk]

Hi all,

I do recordings for my church to post on our website. I have been using my laptop with an M-Audio external sound card for a while, but I got really sick of lugging all that junk around when all we need is a medium quality mono mp3 for web use. So I got looking into portable recording devices, I have always thought the concept of MD's was great but for years was turned off by the fact that you can't transfer digitally to PC's. When I found out that Sony added that feature to their Hi-MD devices I was stoked! So I did a little research and decided that the RH1 was a the best choice for me.

Yesterday I did my first test run with the RH1, recording the whole service which was about 59 minutes long. I just plug right into the outputs from our mixer. I used the Hi-SP recording mode. I transferred the music to my PC using Sonicstage 3.4 (I have since upgraded to 4.3 but have not used it yet). Then I had it convert the file to wav. When it was done it had split the single file into 16 tracks! I looked everywhere in Sonicstage for a way to prevent that, but I found nothing. I was able to manually put the tracks back together in Audacity, but this is a real pain, I would rather just carry my stupid laptop around lol.

Is there a solution to this, I have been searching the forums but so far no luck. Did I just do something wrong when I recorded/transfered/converted the files?

A second, but less significant problem at this point, which I suspect I have the answer to: I tested the recorder by recording some music from my pc off the analog outputs of my sound card. I left those files on there when I did the recording at church. One thing I had changed was the recording mode, I don't remember what mode I used to record from my PC, but when I did the recordings of my church I used Hi-SP. All of the files on the minidisc were .HMA if that helps.

When I transferred all the files the beginning of the church recording was really messed up, like garbled and you could barely make out the music and voices. Is this because I changed record modes or did something else go wrong? I don't think there was anything wrong with the input levels because I was monitoring the minidisc with some headphones and it sounded fine the whole time. Fortunately the parts I needed from the church recording were fine, but I want to make sure this doesn't happen again if at all possible.

Great forum here and thanks for reading!

Thanks all!

Greg

[Richard]

* Moved to Software Discussion section

[raintheory]

When recording via the line-in, when the sound drops below a certain level for more than a second or two, a trackmark is automatically created. Unfortunately there is no way around this.

However, you can easily remove the trackmarks from the recording prior to uploading. Simply move to each trackmark (with the unit in pause) and press T MARK. Alternately, you can combine the tracks in SonicStage after uploading the recording, but prior to converting to WAV (highlight the tracks, then choose the feature under the edit menu, just be sure you have the feature "Automatically convert to WAV" disabled).

Hope this helps,

Edited March 19, 2007 by raintheory

[gregk]

Yea that worked thanks. It takes a lot of extra steps to use the MD vs my laptop for recording. With the laptop all I had to do was copy the file to my main PC, cut off the ends and convert it to MP3. So far with the MD I have to transfer it, remove the tracks, convert to wav, then I can finally cut the ends and convert to mp3 and those first 3 steps take a while on my computer. So basically the time I save not having to use my laptop is lost in the editing stage with the MD. At least I dont have to lug my beast of a laptop around anymore

Thanks for the response,

Greg