Hi guys. I was on here a few days ago asking about Sony players.
Well I did it, I went hog-wild. I just received from Minidisco an
MZ-R90, a spare battery and an Xtel Storm Platinum optical output
sound card. I wasted most of the day playing with this stuff. OK,
I'm won over. For once my membership in Procrastinator's Anonymous
paid off. I waited long enough to buy an MP3 player that I (re)
discovered MD.
OK, I have some questions. I've been burning my MP3 music to MD all
afternoon and I have some problems/questions.
The biggie. The Sony doesn't detect intersong spaces and lay down a
mark in any mode. I have the WinAmp inter-song silence plugin and
it's working. Using the optical interface, I've tried both manually
recording and using sync record. Nadda. Records OK, just no track
marks. What's the trick.
I notice that the optical output of the sound card is on all the
time. Is that normal? From what I've read in the archives and on
the MD boards, I get the notion that some optical devices turn the
light off when not transmitting data. Could this be the root of my
problem above? If I momentarily remove the fiber optic cable from
the sound card, the MD recorder DOES write a track marker.
The audio level to the recorder is low from all digital sources.
MP3, RealAudio, CD player, etc. I have the SP/DIF slider on volume
control wide open and yet I still have to run the manual gain on the
MZ up all the way to get the VU meter to even occasionally bump 20
over. This is what sounds the best too. Left on auto gain, the
playback audio at full volume is barely useable through my
PortaPros.
An interesting observation. This unit is claimed to have 40 seconds
of anti-skip memory. IT seems to have a lot more. It sounds like
it rips at least a song's worth of data into memory and then turns
off the disc drive. The unit is totally silent for several
minutes. This must be the trick that has let Sony get 16 hours of
playback on the lipstick battery.
I think I'm going to really like this little unit!
BTW, I can't say enough nice about MiniDisco. Almost the cheapest
price. I asked for email confirmation of my order and ship date
independently of their mail robot. I got that. Then someone called
to confirm the order right before shipping. Finally, it arrived
right on time this morning, second day service just like I asked.
John
--
John De Armond
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://personal.bellsouth.net/~johngd/
Neon John's Custom Neon
Cleveland, TN
"Bendin' Glass 'n Passin' Gas"
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