Sonic Stage and OpenMG

[sfbp]

Hi folks, I am so excited, I cannot type fast enough - forgive my incoherencies in what follows.

Today I discovered something really surprising. The old hands will probably tell us that this is known behaviour, and I am sure it is But I think possibly it gives an insight into exactly HOW the software maintains stuff on a minidisc. This is actually HiMD behaviour, but it is a (?clever?) design trick that might work this way on the previous implementations too.

By way of preface, 1kyle asked about how to get a blank music file on a MD, and I replied something about lets muck around and snoop the USB transactions. This goes a bit further, because it shows that the ORIGIN of a track has a lot to do with how that track is treated by the software that tries to protect things from bad stuff like people editing copyrighted tracks.

Here's the scenario. Each Sunday I get a full disk off the Radio with about 6 hours of stuff in it. Usually in 2 parts, each part gets its own group because that's the way the NH700 is set - every time I press REC, I get a new group. My input is optical, and although Sony says you cannot edit optically recorded tracks (maybe that's not so, but the restrictions are so badly worded that I am not clear what you can and cannot do), I am able to put track marks in the sound - and title them - before uploading to the computer for further enjoyment and archiving to CD when I find something I really like.

Sometimes there's a break in the second part, so I have 3 groups. Today there wasn't - so I used SS to move the last 60+ minutes into a new group before editing it. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that although I had already divided most of the tracks before the last hour, when I tried to edit the last hour, I got the (by now quite familiar) "cannot edit" message on the display of the NH700. I thought about this for a bit, and went back and checked the other tracks (all titled, named, and in some cases already uploaded to PC) and I could still put a track mark in them.

What could be wrong? - I thought. So I moved the last track BACK INTO THE PREVIOUS GROUP where it had started life. Bingo! I can now edit it to my heart's content.

So the fact that this track was in a group that SS had titled, or in a group that was not the original group it started life in, made the ability to edit it disappear. (I am not clear exactly what so someone else can try to narrow this down further).

Surely this bizarre behaviour must tell us a lot about the mechanism for protecting the tracks on a MD???? I welcome suggestions both as to the mechanism, and to other experiments you or I might do to see if we can use this to help understand the whole protection setup better. Marc, I bet you know about this.... wherever you are.

Stephen