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Guest Anonymous

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Guest Anonymous

Hi

can anyone tell me if it is possible to create a SP mode minidisc using NET MD technology? I'm a little bit confused about this.

I want to get MP3's from my PC onto my non-LP minidisc player in my car. I know I can't play LP minidiscs on my car system, but don't want to shell out the money on a new LP compatible player for my car as they are expensive.

Thanks

John Langdon

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Guest Anonymous

I thought NetMD SP is high-bitrate ATRAC3 which the player re-encodes to SP?

Didn't mean to undermine you there.

...

The best qay to get SP tracks for your car player is probably to use the optical recording capability of your NetMD unit rather than using NetMD. This can be done with a CD player, DVD player, or soundcard which has optical output. You'll need a Toslink->Toslink cable with a miniplug adapter or a Toslink->Miniplug optical cable for this.

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u can create SP mode thru NetMD via SonicStage/OpenMG but it is not true SP...what it is rather is a higher bitrate LP2 track that gets recognised by the MD unit as an SP track

How can you select this higher bitrate LP2 with SonicStage?

When I convert MP3s from my system, SonicStage only ever offers me LP2 or LP4 format... no SP at all. Now, I haven't tried copying actual CD tracks through SonicStage, but SimpleBurner certainly doesn't offer anything other than LP2. Am I missing something somewhere? I'd love to be able to listen to LP2 tracks at a higher bitrate than 132kbps on my MZ-NE410.

Thanks in advance! :-)

-K

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well basically you can find this option before you are about to transfer from your Music Drive to your Device Media...there will be a box at the top in the middle that will look like this :

user posted image

just click on that tool icon there where i've highlighted (to the right of where it says normal)...

it should then pop up a box that look similar to this :

user posted image

just click on the SP option down the bottom (highlighted) and click ok...it should encode and transfer over files in SP mode now...

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Aha! biggrin.gif

Thanks, Majestic! Found it, now. You are both a scholar and gentleman!

Sheesh, SonicStage sure makes you jump through a lot of hoops to get what you want. I like SimpleBurner so much better - it's so... simple. :wink:

Two more questions, if I may:

a) You said earlier that this SP mode via NetMD is not true Atrac3 SP, but rather a higher bitrate LP2. Any idea what that bitrate is?

cool.gif Regarding SonicStage, I've read people complain that it "leaves files on the hard drive" and such, as it converts files to Atrac3 before copying to the MD. Where would I found all this redundant data, so that I can keep track of how much space SonicStage is eating up?

Thanks again!!

-K

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a) Its "true and normal" SP, so no difference to other SP recordings. Only difference is, that the song is created from a LP2 file, so the qualitly does not increase but stays basically on the LP2 level. But as ATRAC3 (LP modes) is more advanced than ATRAC (SP) the quality is not that much worse as one would gues while looking at the raw bitrates. So no need to worry that much, especially as a car is not the optimal listening situation for comparing such small differences.

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tmeg already has kinda answered part a) of ur q's..i'll just exapand a bit about what i said earlier...what i meant is as SP when recorded normally w/o transferring using USB it will be encoded in ATRAC (using Type R ATRAC DSP) which will theoretically sound better than that done through SP via SonicStage as this is about LP2 quality ATRAC3 format but yes i agree with what tmeg has to say about it not sounding that bad...as for part cool.gif here i go :

For SonicStage :

by just clicking on the Menu button on the bottom left then go to Options...from there there should be an option on the left box called Location to save the recorded files...clicking on that will show you where SonicStage puts them....just copy and paste that directory into Windows Explorer and go to that directory and delete all the .omg files there...

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That screen shot you put up of the option selection box in Sonic Stage was a screen shot from Mac OSX - what gives??

What software is that??

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

He's using an OSX Panther skins for his PC.

http://www.wincustomize.com/skins.asp?sear...rder=Descending

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it's not Mac OS X...i just skinned win xp using windowsblinds so that it makes it look like that...otherwise use virtual pc loaded with winxp on it and install sonicstage that way...that's basically the only other way that i can think of to get Sonicstage onto Mac...

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I frankly wouldn't even let VPC near my office machine.

I have a network in the house and I set up a playlist folder on the PC that is in the basement and then transfer to it the music I want to convert and load on the the MD. Then when I have I some time I convert the plylists and transfer them to the MD.

Flawless operation.

Then I delete the coverted playlist and the original files off the PC harddrive. NO checkin issues because all of the music files are on the monster hard drive attached to the UNIX running Mac in my office.

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Thanks for helping me out, folks...

I've successfully been able to transfer songs from my computer to the MD as SP tracks. BUT, I still have some more questions about bitrate, and overall quality. :roll: Sorry to be a pain.

Okay, just to test I did the following:

Transferred a track ripped as WAV from a CD to my MD, using SP quality.

Then I transferred the same track directly from CD to the MD using SimpleBurner, in LP2 format.

After this was done, SonicStage tells me the following about the tracks:

Track A is encoded with the ATRAC codec in Stereo, and takes up 9.33 MB of space on the MD for 4:27 minutes of audio.

Track B is encoded with the ATRAC3 codec in Stereo LP2, and takes up 4.66 MB of space on the MD for 4:27 minutes of audio.

If I look at the properties for the OMG file in the playlist created by SonicStage (I didn't tell it to create an optimized file, but I guess it did anyways), it says that Track A has a bitrate of 132 kbps.

So... is there any audio quality difference at all between these two tracks on the MD? Or are they both 132 kbps audio, but encoded in different codecs so that Track A can be played back in older MDs that don't do MDLP? (I think that's what tmeg was getting at, above).

Thanks again! I've almost got my head wrapped around this. smile.gif

-K

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So... is there any audio quality difference at all between these two tracks on the MD? Or are they both 132 kbps audio, but encoded in different codecs so that Track A can be played back in older MDs that don't do MDLP? (I think that's what tmeg was getting at, above).

what tmeg said above was right...there is hardly any difference between the SP and LP2 tracks in terms of bitrate when transferred from SonicStage via USB -> MD...listening to them also it's hard to tell the difference...but otherwise i would think that they are both 132kbps ATRAC3 tracks that have different instructions enaling track A to be read on a non-MDLP capable unit and track B to be played in a MDLP capable player...

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