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MZ-NH1 vs iPod Mini review is finally up on Head-Fi.

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bhangraman

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I've been threatning this for a while, but have not had the chance to collate my notes. It's finally up.

I'm linking to the thread for now as I thought people might want comparisons based on things I'd missed, or they wanted Hi-MD specific information inserted. Once the review is 'frozen' I can post a copy of it here.

http://www5.head-fi.org/forums/showthread.php?t=78472

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DRM

Digital Rights Management is of course one of the hot topics of music these days, and Sony was at the vanguard of the more restrictive vendors of playback gear. With Sonicstage 2.0 they have made concessions for fair use, and now you can transfer your own ripped music an unlimited number of times to Hi-MD. However, only one PC is licensed to use the music that you rip from your own CD’s, which means that if you have more than one PC, the music cannot be transported between PC’s.

What I am planning to do is to copy all my music on my computer to CD's, buy the Hi-MD in Japan, and use the computer that my homestay family has to copy the music to the Hi-MD.

Does this mean that when I bring the Hi-MD back to Oz, I wont be able to copy any new music from my computer, because i already used the computer in Japan?

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Wow, while I'm not completely surprised by this move on Sony's part, it still saddens me. The ability to not be able to at *least* burn uploaded material to CD is quite stupid. I wonder if this would warrant some form of petition to Sony, similar to the original one regarding this same issue.

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While there are clear limitations to moving individual songs from one computer to another, there is no problem moving an entire library. You simply use the backup program, then restore the library to the new PC. You could use this method to move your library from the PC in Japan to your PC in OZ. The only issue is what media to backup onto. You can use CDR, DVDR, DVDRW or a hard disk drive. Or I guess you could use floppys: lots and lots of floppys :grin:

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Leland's correct. You can use the Sonicstage backup program to move your music and the associated rights to a new computer. You could of course back up to Hi-MD. HDD or Hi-MD, the backup is mind-numbingly slow for some reason that I can't fathom: Backup of a 2.5Gb library takes over an hour on HDD using a 1.1Ghz Centrino (running on AC, ie full power).

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I have been waiting for an uploading MD recorder. I have been using an MZ-B100 to record lectures and sermons and then re-recording them to a NJB3 for digital upload. With the new Hi-MDs encrypting all uploads, it seems I would be stuck with an analog re-recording via Total Recorder before I could burn them to a CD.

Right now, I have switched to using an Olympus DS-2200 voice recorder to record speech in 64kbps stereo WMA format. Uploading takes a few minutes per hour of speech. Burning to a data CD can be done as is or they can be converted to WAVs for an audio CD.

With the limitations to the new Hi-MD, I will not be buying any of the current line of Hi-MDs unless my MD recorders fail.

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Hobgoblin

Magneto-optic recording has always been slow. Remember that the main use of the Hi-MD is as an audio player and as such the recording and reading rates for the media will be limited to the speed needed to perform these functions.

Sony has added the ability to use the discs as data storage but I doubt they will increase the speed that they will move data at :sad:

The unit only uses USB1.1 as the speed that information can be placed on the disc is slower than the max speed for USB1.1, therefore USB2 is not needed

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I knew this was going to be mistaken.

The Sonicstage backup program backs up the .OMG ATRAC files you have ON YOUR PC along with the rights information, onto any media you choose. It can be another partition, a different drive, even a UDF CD-RW/DVD-RW AFAIK.

While Hi-MD data transfer is fairly slow by HDD comparisons, all I was doing was backing up that library ONTO ANOTHER HDD. Nothing to do with storing it onto Hi-MD as far as my test goes.

Backing up the 2.5GB library on the hard disk TO ANOTHER HARD DISK using the laptop mentioned (Centrino 1.1Ghz on AC) took over an hour. It's that slow! I have no idea whether backing up onto 1Gb Hi-MD media instead of HDD would be slower, as I dont' have 1Gb media yet. It certainly won't be faster though.

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  • 2 weeks later...

bhangraman, I don't know what the problem might have been with your system. I just backed up my 15 Gig SS 2 database using the backup program and it took 40 minutes. I was doing it on a laptop with a 1.5 gHz Pentium M (Centrino) from HD to HD, one internal, one on a secondary IDE using the internal bay. Considering that laptops are not usually speed demons, there must be some other consideration with your system.

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  • 1 month later...

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