Sweet talking woman...

[spiff]

I fully realize not everybody is a big fan of Electric Light Orchestra (E.L.O.), but I´m having an interesting problem with their song “Sweet talkin´woman”. The file in question is a 256 kbps mp3 archive that plays fine through Winamp, SonicStage or any mp3 player you might care to mention. Additionally the file transfers and plays perfectly well on any of my Sony NetMD and HiMD minidisc units (including a Sony PSP!) at the various compression and ATRAC settings I have tried so far.

Trouble happens when I record and play that file on my Sharp IM-DR80 NetMD unit. The transfer goes without a hitch, but when I play the file I get weird distortions and silences, always reproducible in timing and duration. The weirdness is very severe with LP4 compression and markedly less so with the LP2 setting. It is not a disk problem, since it always happens regardless of the multiple disks I have tried. I doubt it is a hardware fault of my Sharp unit, as the aberrations only occur with this particular file, despite my eclectic musical mixes, and is independent of the location of the track in the disk (beginning, middle or end makes no difference).

Since this is my only Sharp unit, I cannot positively rule out a hardware failure and I am limited in the type of tests I can perform.

However, I strongly suspect this particular file is causing a severe case of indigestion with Sharp´s implementation of the ATRAC codecs.

If anybody has any insights, ideas or additional tests they might like to share, I would be very grateful.

[Strungup]

You have an ex girlfriend still in luv that has cast a spell ,???? and is telling you to look "SHARP" at your surroundings ??

Sorry I couldn't resist ............

[bobt]

Try a realtime or SP recording, see what happens. May be that combination of bitrate, mp3 and transcoding is turning Sweet Talking Woman into Evil Woman

Couldn't help that one,

Good luck,

Bob