What Are You Listening To Right Now?

[FireTiger]

4 hours ago, Ternaugh said:

 

My project last weekend was to see if I could get Sony Connect software to work on a computer running Windows 10 64-bit, so that I could move tracks to minidisc. Sony stopped developing the software sometime in 2006, so there's no Sony-provided drivers for any OS past XP 32-bit.

 

I stumbled onto this site which made working with NetMD devices much easier under Win10:  Web MiniDisc - Brings NetMD Devices to the Web (brilli.me)  

 

I have a MZ-NE410 that I bought as NOS (new old stock) and a MXD-D40 CD/MD deck.  I use the deck for pulling tracks from CD and NE410 for pulling files from PC.  The only trouble I've had using LP4 is if the source file from PC isn't decent quality to begin with—those often suffer during the conversion to ATRAC.

 

The area I live in does 'peak pricing' for electricity from the beginning of June to the end of September during most of my work-from-home day, and being able to connect the NE410 to a self-powered speaker gives me an efficient way to have background audio playing without using more AC power.  (The speaker usually wants charging every other day of heavy use, but I can get at whole work-week out the one rechargeable AA in the NE410.)

 

And since I'm posting here again:
"Little Sister" - Concrete Blonde - Custom minidisc track 67 (of 74)

[Ternaugh]

28 minutes ago, FireTiger said:

 

I stumbled onto this site which made working with NetMD devices much easier under Win10:  Web MiniDisc - Brings NetMD Devices to the Web (brilli.me)  

 

I have a MZ-NE410 that I bought as NOS (new old stock) and a MXD-D40 CD/MD deck.  I use the deck for pulling tracks from CD and NE410 for pulling files from PC.  The only trouble I've had using LP4 is if the source file from PC isn't decent quality to begin with—those often suffer during the conversion to ATRAC.

 

The area I live in does 'peak pricing' for electricity from the beginning of June to the end of September during most of my work-from-home day, and being able to connect the NE410 to a self-powered speaker gives me an efficient way to have background audio playing without using more AC power.  (The speaker usually wants charging every other day of heavy use, but I can get at whole work-week out the one rechargeable AA in the NE410.)

 

And since I'm posting here again:
"Little Sister" - Concrete Blonde - Custom minidisc track 67 (of 74)

 

I couldn't get Web MiniDisc to read/write the discs correctly, so I went back to the Sony software. It might have been because I was using a HiMD recorder, though.

 

The NE410 is the second generation of NetMD players, and was a decent little unit. the only real differences between it and my MZ-N505 is that the NE410 doesn't have an optical/analog input, and the screen's smaller than my first-generation unit. Battery life is pretty amazing for both units as you note. I've occasionally looked for an MD deck, but they are notoriously hard to repair nowadays, and working ones are often exorbitantly priced. HiMD decks are even harder to find, as they were really only sold in Japan. 

 

LP4 mode is a lower bitrate and uses something called joint stereo, meaning that the one channel is actually created as a differential from the other. It is extremely susceptible to introducing artifacts, especially on more complicated musical pieces, or pieces where the two channels are extremely different from each other. I usually can't tell much of a difference between SP and LP2, however, so I usually use LP2. There's a transcoding step going to MD, and as you note, LP4 is highly susceptible to artifacts and degradation from less than clean sources.

 

Now playing "Winds of Santa Ana" by Animal Logic, on my MZ-N505.

 

 

[FireTiger]

4 hours ago, Ternaugh said:

 

I couldn't get Web MiniDisc to read/write the discs correctly, so I went back to the Sony software. It might have been because I was using a HiMD recorder, though.

 

It should work with HiMD devices, though I don't have one here.  While those pop up at reasonable prices now & then the 1GB discs seem to be rare & expensive.  

 

If you tried it on the same machine that has the Sony software, that might be why, as it doesn't get along with the drivers recommended by Web MiniDisc.  From the wiki guide:
 

Quote

Please note that if you use SonicStage on the same PC, you will need to uninstall Zadig to connect your NetMD device to SonicStage(and vice-versa.)

 

I didn't hit that problem myself since I use Web MiniDisc on a Win10 machine without SonicStage.  (Though I do have SonicStage installed on a WinXP machine.)  I was hoping that Web MiniDisc would work for you, as I've found it to be quite useful.

 

And just now as I'm typing:
"What's Going On" - Marvin Gaye finished, and "Wild World" - Cat Stevens has started.
Custom 70's music minidisc, tracks 07 & 08 (of 76)

[Ternaugh]

4 hours ago, FireTiger said:

It should work with HiMD devices, though I don't have one here.  While those pop up at reasonable prices now & then the 1GB discs seem to be rare & expensive.  

 

If you tried it on the same machine that has the Sony software, that might be why, as it doesn't get along with the drivers recommended by Web MiniDisc.  From the wiki guide:
 

 

I didn't hit that problem myself since I use Web MiniDisc on a Win10 machine without SonicStage.  (Though I do have SonicStage installed on a WinXP machine.)  I was hoping that Web MiniDisc would work for you, as I've found it to be quite useful.

 

And just now as I'm typing:
"What's Going On" - Marvin Gaye finished, and "Wild World" - Cat Stevens has started.
Custom 70's music minidisc, tracks 07 & 08 (of 76)

 

I had tried Zadig + Web MiniDisc first, but I just couldn't get it to read what was on a disc, or write to it. And one new blank ended up tiling the webpage with repeating Japanese characters.

[Ragitsu]

17 hours ago, Ternaugh said:

 

My project last weekend was to see if I could get Sony Connect software to work on a computer running Windows 10 64-bit, so that I could move tracks to minidisc. Sony stopped developing the software sometime in 2006, so there's no Sony-provided drivers for any OS past XP 32-bit. That meant turning off signed driver protection for one boot cycle to install the (fan-made) netMD driver, and I didn't want to risk it on my gaming rig or my laptop, so I decided to dust off a very old PC of mine. After several hours of tinkering, I was able to transfer tracks over to one of my HiMD recorders*, and then play the disc back on one of my MZ-N505 units. Sound quality was very good, even in LP2 mode converted from MP3. The tracks were from Animal Logic's first album, and there were a couple of classical albums already on the disc.

 

The computer I used is running a first-generation Core 2 Duo desktop (1.8 GHz, 2 cores, no HyperThreading), and I've been slowly bringing it up from Windows 10 1607. It's at 1903 now, and I'm fighting it to see if we can get it to a supported version of Windows 10. I don't think that I ever upgraded to an SSD for the boot drive, and it feels extremely slow, especially compared to my modern gaming rig.

 

 

*I have a couple of the HiMD Walkmans that had OLED screens, which are now completely unreadable due to fade. They are really only usable for playback with one of the wired remotes. They do, however, allow transfers to MiniDisc using power from a USB connection, so I don't have to find one of the wall power supplies like I would with my other HiMD or the two MZ-N505 units I have. All of my MiniDisc stuff got boxed about the time I bought my iPod Classic 160GB unit in 2007, but I bring it out every once in a while to tinker. The iPod's been upgraded with Rockbox, so it now plays FLAC files directly, but with a huge performance hit on battery life.

 

I read your comment to

 

 

...and it fit.

[Joe Walsh]

 

[Ternaugh]

New day, new experiment. Using Zadig + Web MiniDisc on my gaming rig, with an MZ-N505 worked. I don't think the driver that Zadig uses is fully compatible with Hi-MD, or it didn't like something on the old system. It handled FLAC to ATRAC LP2 conversion beautifully, and saves me the trouble of converting to an intermediate format. I had a brief hiccup trying to send additional tracks, but stopping and disconnecting/reconnecting the player fixed it (errors like this sometimes happened with the original software, so no big deal).

 

Now playing "Dogs of War" by Pink Floyd, from the album, A Momentary Lapse of Reason (Updated and Remixed), from MiniDisc. 

[FireTiger]

On 9/23/2022 at 10:53 AM, Ternaugh said:

New day, new experiment. Using Zadig + Web MiniDisc on my gaming rig, with an MZ-N505 worked. I don't think the driver that Zadig uses is fully compatible with Hi-MD, or it didn't like something on the old system. It handled FLAC to ATRAC LP2 conversion beautifully, and saves me the trouble of converting to an intermediate format. I had a brief hiccup trying to send additional tracks, but stopping and disconnecting/reconnecting the player fixed it (errors like this sometimes happened with the original software, so no big deal).

 

Now playing "Dogs of War" by Pink Floyd, from the album, A Momentary Lapse of Reason (Updated and Remixed), from MiniDisc. 

 

Ah, good, I'm glad you got that to work.  One major advantage of Web MiniDisc for me (and I have the App version installed on this machine) is editing track names.  So few CDs include CD-Text info these days, and editing on the CD/MD deck is done one character at a time.

 

"Flirtin' with Disaster" - Molly Hatchet - track 26 (of 76) 70's-themed MiniDisc

 

And my little battery-time playback rig:

 

[Ternaugh]

"The Secret" by Alan Parsons, from the album, From the New World (48kHz/24-bit FLAC file converted to ATRAC LP2 onto MD)

Followed by: "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" by Alan Parsons, from the album, The Secret (96kHz/24-bit FLAC file converted to ATRAC LP2 onto MD), both to test Web MiniDisc conversions. 

So far, so good.

 

 

[FireTiger]

"Edge of a Broken Heart" - Vixen - Custom MiniDisc track 09 (of 69):

 

 

[Pariah]

 

[Ragitsu]

 

[FireTiger]

"Bad Miss M" - Danielle Dax
The broadcast this recording came from got the song's title wrong:

 

[FireTiger]

And a change of gears:  Suspense - "Voyage through Darkness" - 1944-09-07 - Starring Olivia de Havilland and Reginald Gardiner:

 

[tkdguy]

 

[FireTiger]

"Whole Lotta Love - Led Zeppelin - Audiocassette - Side 1 / Track 01 - Maxell Metal Capsule 100 - Recorded 1990-11-28

 

 

[Ragitsu]

 

[FireTiger]

"I Am A Rock" - Simon & Garfunkel - Audio Cassette - Side 2 / Track 02 - Maxell Metal Capsule 100 - Recorded 1990-11-28

 

 

[tkdguy]

 

[tkdguy]

 

[Ragitsu]

 

[FireTiger]

Album "Cat Dancer" - Sandy Stewart - Vinyl LP - Modern Records - 1984

 

 

[Ragitsu]

 

[FireTiger]

"The War of the Worlds" - The Mercury Theater on the Air - 1938-10-30 - The 60 Greatest Old-Time Radio Shows of the 20th Century - CD version - Disc 1 Track 2

 

 

[FireTiger]

"The Hitchhiker" - The Mercury Summer Theater - 1946-06-21 - The 60 Greatest Old-Time Radio Shows of the 20th Century - CD version - Disc 16 Track 1

This story appeared later on television (as "The Hitch-Hiker") as episode 16 from season one of The Twilight Zone (1960-01-22), and later still (again using "The Hitch-Hiker" title) as episode six in volume six of The Twilight Zone Radio Dramas (early 2000's).